HUMANISM IN THE POETRY OF EARLE BIRNEY

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Humanism in the Poetry of Earle Birney

By Arthur s. Wildish

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English

Memorial University of Newfoundland

July 1970 ii

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Dr. P.J. Gardner for his patience and the numerous suggestions he provided in the course of the preparation of this thesis.

I wish also to express my gratitude to the English Department of Memorial University without whose financial assist­ ance this thesis could not have been completed. iii.

Table of Contents

Chapter Page

1 Introduction ...... 1

2 David and Other Poems ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 6

3 Nmo1 is Time 30

4 The Strait of Anian and Trial of a City ••••••••••• 50

5 Ice Cod Bell or Stone and Near False Creek Mouth •• 75

6 Conclusion...... 113

Bibilography ...... 117 Abstract

The main thematic concern of Earle Birney's poetry is man and the condition of man; in this sense he is a humanist. Most of the poems attempt to place before the reader a picture of real men~ who are seen in all their glory and all their degradation. The forces of evil and the men who unleash them are contrasted with the capacity for good that mankind possesses.

The first volume of poetry discussed is David and Other Poems

(1942). In the title poem one individual alienates himself from nature for the sake of his friends; by exercising his will he sacri­ fices himself for a higher~ human, good. The other poems are works of natural description, poetry of war, and poetry of the confront­ ation of urban life and nature. In this volume also, we see Birney's interest in the language of poetry as he experiments with verse forms and creates neologisms on an Anglo-saxon pattern. Now is Time

(1945) is composed largely of war poems; the precarious human condition is dramatized even more vividly in poetry that examines selflessness and love, a lack of which alienates men from one another. The Strait of Anian (1948) and Trial of a City (1952) emphasize like "David" the importance of man's will in determining what the future will be; the power for good is in man's will to good. Trial of a City is a verse drama that epitomizes Birney's humanistic concerns and greatly ex­ tends his use of neologism, Middle-English and Anglo-Saxon forms. His purpose in creating new words is compared and contrasted w~th that of Abstract page two

James Joyce and William Barnes. In Ice Cod Bell or Stone (1962) and

Near False Creek Mouth (1964)~ the humanistic impetus of the poems is continued in a concern for culture and history-the past that man himself has created. As a visitor to foreign lands~ the poet appreciates the culture of the local people and sees the conflict between material prosperity and the heritage of the past. Over­ coming the estrangement resulting from his wealth~ he comes to love the people and in so doing he is restored to the community of men.

In these last two volumes~ the poet's technique includes typographical experimentation after the fashion of E.E. Cummings and a manipulation of words and letters that is almost like concrete poetry. Chapter 1

Introduction 2 .•

The following thesis is a study of the poetry of Earle Birney.

Particular stress has been placed upon man and the condition of man as treated in individual poems, though it is by no means implied that

there are not other poems which diverge from the subject treated here.

An examination of a considerable number of Birney's poems reveals evidence which supports the main contention of this thesis-that the dominant concern of his poetry as a whole is man. "Humanistic" is perhaps the most accurate word to describe the thematic burden of the poems, although the academic implications of the term are somewhat misleading. "Humanistic", as the word is used in the context of this thesis, is meant in its broadest sense as that which relates to man and bears no relationship to Renaissance ·humanism with its emphasis upon the revival of interest in classical languages and literature.

In varying degrees, the poetry here treated reflects the pre­ cariousness of man's life in the world. Always there are choices to be made and the results of man's decisions are war and peace, security and disturbance, love and hatred. For this reason, therefore, it is unwise to take any one poem as an absolute statement on life. The poems are best viewed in the context of Birney's work as a whole; with this perspective one is able to avoid the convenient but not very just approach of designating the poet as a prophet of doom or a naive optimist.

The reality of any given moment or situation, be it joyful or sad, demands an honest aesthetic response, and it is such a response that

Birney gives.

What this latter point means for the poetry itself is that 3. there is no systematized philosophical framework against which

Birney checks and examines his individual poetic insights. This is not to say that his is a completely non-didactic poetry; there is didacticism, but it is not imposed from without. The men and women in his poems and the events that shape their lives can be altered by love, the source of which is within. Man can will to stop war, to end poverty, to halt racial prejudice, but the choice rests with man alone. It is in the possibility of peace, economic justice, and respect for other men that hope resides and it is in their continued absence that we have cause for fear.

To a large extent, then, the poetry of Earle Birney is one of social comment, insofar as the poems involve men and the world that men have created. But it is not a proletarian verse, for the plight of the workers and their cause are only part of the total picture of man.

Chapter One of the thesis deals with the earliest volume,

David and Other Poems, published in 1942. In "David" itself we wee the importance of one man's decision in a choice that alters his out­ look on nature and by which he grows to maturity. The rest of the poems have been classified as natural descriptions, in which nature is described in terms borrowed from the world of man-especially warring and hostile man; poetry depicting the evils of urban life, in which man is seen as an intruder upon nature and some of the creations of man as being opposed to him and alienating him from nature; and poetry ~f war, which deals with the stark realities of conflict and the 4. effect of war upon nature. In this first volume we are also exposed to Birney's interest in Anglo-Saxon verse and his use of neologism.

The second chapter consists of a more extensive survey of the war poems. Those selected for discussion are drawn from the volume entitled Now Is Time (1945). Birney has arranged the poems under three headings: "Tomorrow", "Yesterday", and "Today". The first of these sections is pervaded by a sense of urgency and im­ pending doom; war, poverty, and greed are caused by the presence of selfishness or the absence of love. Men are thereby separated from one another and love becomes imperative if the evils of war are to be avoided. "Yesterday" has the motif of remembrance of friends and loved ones in the past, while in the "Today" section peace has come, but it is precarious; the stress is once again upon love as a positive force and not merely upon the absence of hostilities.

The Strait of Anian and the drama Trial of a City, published in 1948 and 1952 respectively, are discussed in Chapter Three. As in the previous chapter, the perilousness of man's existence remains an important part of Birney's vision of man. The emphasis here is upon the ability of man to alter events by his own volition. Despite the dangers of existence, men must continue to live as best they can; the power for good is in man's will to good. Trial of a City is a verse drama, a new genre that epitomizes Birney's humanistic concern6. In it he carries his experimentation with language further than in his e~rlier volumes. The Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English types of verse are continued, but there is a much greater use of neologism, in 5.

connection with which James Joyce and William Barnes are considered.

In the creation of new words Birney finds a fresh source of humour

and sustains his search for a more unconventional idiom, though he

differs from Joyce in not sustaining the use of neologism throughout

the whole of his work and from Barnes in that he is not a linguistic purist.

The volumes of poetry treated in Chapter Four are Ice Cod Bell or Stone (1962) and Near False Creek Mouth (1964). Many of the poems in these volumes have their setting in foreign lands and the subject matter is intimately connected with the history and culture of the local people. There is less concern here with primeval nature. There are fewer poems of description, and greater emphasis is placed upon the past that man himself has created. The people of these foreign countries possess a heritage that the poet by virtue of his birth is denied.

Modern civilization threatens to eliminate the culture of these people and consequently some poems portray and lament the conflict between the old tradition and the new material prosperity. As one who is prosperous, the poet is estranged from the inhabitants of the lands that he visits, but comes to understand and appreciate them; sharing a common humanity, he conquers his repugnance at the squalor of their life and achieves brotherhood and love. Chapter 11

David and Other Poems 7.

I In the author's note to Near False Creek Mouth, Earle

Birney writes:

This book contains the longest non-dramatic poem I have ever written. Its setting is Vancouver but its theme is our precarious universe. Most of the poems involve people and places thousands of miles from False Creek, near whose mouth I live, but they are all close to us now, not only in time space, but in the sharing of needs and hopes­ 1 and premonitions of disaster.

What this statement does is to bring into focus the ambiguous, or, as the poet phrases it, the "precarious" universe in which we live. Birney's poetry is at once optimistic and pessimistic: optimistic, in that it captures the hopes spoken of above and pessimistic in that it realistically depicts the dangers which inhabit and threaten to engulf our world.

Birney's first volume of poetry, David and Other Poems

(1942), manifests the precariousness of human existence in terms which were of great import for a people surrounded by war. The immediacy of the war poems in this and the succeeding volume derives in part from their frank portrayal of the horrors of war and its aftermath, but more specifically from their appraisal of the lack of humane values and capacity for evil on the part of some men who could so degrade their fellow humans and leave so little to be cher- ished in the way of human dignity. Hope and fear, for Birney, have their source in man's communion with nature and other men; and it is

1 Earle Birney, Near False Creek Mouth (Toronto, 1964), author's note. 8. from these two relationships that the human values of love, honour, friendship, and trust receive their definition.

Among the early poems it is "David" which best illustrates the ambiguous nature of human existence. In a sense the war con- tinues here as well, for superficially it is a narrative of men against nature:

We climbed, to get from the ruck of the camp, the surly

Poker, the wrangling, the snoring under the fetid Tents, and because we had joy in our lengthening coltish Muscles, and mountains for David were made to see over, 2 Stairs from the valleys and steps to the sun's retreats . The two young men of the poem delight in the conquering of their mountains. Bob, the narrator, is a novice in the art of mountain- climbing; in serving his apprenticeship to David, he comes to possess something of the vision that the outdoor life engenders in his mentor.

The first and most obvious aspect of this vision is an appreciation of the beauty which surrounds them:

The dawn was a floating Of mists till we reached to the slopes above timber, and won

To snow like fire in the sunlight. (11, p.2, 11.7-9)

We rose and trod past the feathery Larch, while the stars went out, and the quiet heather Flushed, and the skyline pulsed with the surging bloom

Of incredible dawn in the Rockies. (Vll, pp.S-6, 11.6-9)

2 Earle Birney, "David", David and Other Poems (Toronto, 1942), I, p.l, 11.4-8. Hereafter cited by section, page, and line number in the body of the text. 9.

A second, but no less important, aspect of David's vision is the

way in which pleasure may be derived from the danger amidst the

surrounding beauty; even moments of peril can be turned to advantage:

And David taught me

How time on a knife-edge can pass with the guessing of fragments Remembered from poets, the naming of strata beside one, And matching of stories from schooldays •••• (111, p.3, 11.4-7)

The dangers, however, if they are to be an organic part of the poem,

must not exist solely as the occasion for diversion and good comrade- 3 ship. They must also be an integral part of the narrative structure.

Throughout the poem there are incidents recounted which serve to fore-

shadow David's death:

That day we chanced on the skull and the splayed white ribs Of a mountain goat underneath a cliff, caught tight On a rock. Around were the silken feathers of kites. And that was the first I knew that a goat could slip. (111, p.3, 11.13-16)

In section five there is an even more direct anticipation of David's

fall and Bob's innocence-destr9ying decision:

That day returning we found a robin gyrating In grass, wing-broken. I caught it to tame but David Took · and killed it, and said, "Could you teach it to fly?" (V, p.4, 11.10-12)

3 In an article entitled 11 Earle Birney et Robert Finch", Gants Du ~, 11 (Spring, 1946), 83-96, Roy Daniells also sees them as part of the movement of the poem, thereby contributing to the rapidity and continuity of the poem as a whole. 10.

The implication of this incident for what is to come is that mere existence in itself is never sufficient motivation for continued

living. Consonant with David's treatment of the bird is his later request, at the climax of the poem, that Bob push him over the precipice to the ice below. This request follows David's fifty foot drop to a ledge after he has saved Bob from a fall; still conscious, David does not want to go on living if he must do so in a wheelchair. When, reluctantly, Bob accedes to David's wishes, he runs from the site of the accident; now nature assumes a different guise:

I will not remember how nor why I could twist Up the wind-devilled peak, and down through the chimney's empty Horror, and over the traverse alone. I remember Only the pounding fear I would stumble on It

the fear, and the need to make sure It was there On the ice, the running and falling and running, leaping

Of gaping green-throated crevasses, alone and pursued By the Finger's lengthening shadow. (1X, pp.9-10, 11.1-4;7-10)

The concluding lines of the poem are significant in that they indicate the irrevocability of what has just taken place:

And none but the sun and incurious clouds have lingered Around the marks of that day on the ledge of the Finger, That day, the last of my youth, on the last of our mountains. (1X, p.ll, 11.30-32)

Through his friendship with David, Bob comes to appreciate the escape that the mountains represented from the drudgery of everyday life. Within their joy in the outdoor life and indeed an integral part 11. of it, is an inherent danger. This danger and its challenge are necessary to the vision of life that David possesses, and in which, to a degree, Bob shares. In establishing, or re-establishing, his contact with nature, Bob lives life more fully, shares in the joys of comradeship, and is seized with the elan that pervades everything

David does. Alienated from nature by the tediousness of his work,

Bob is temporarily restored. Because of his friendship for David, he sacrifices the joy of his restoration; he can no longer be as he was.

"David" is, as one critic phrased it, "a story of youth stabbed into 4 age by a sudden and unintelligible agony".

At this point it may be objected that Bob's condition as a man has deteriorated for now he has neither his friendship with David nor his affiliation with nature. To a degree, this is true, but an examination, in the light of Birney's humanism, of what has occurred reveals that the sacrifice in terms of mental attrition is justified in that a higher good, human friendship, is served. It is because

Bob has come to understand David and his vision of life that he is able to suppress his own feeling of revulsion and push David over the cliff.

It might be adde~, moreover, that Bob's alienation from nature at the end of the poem differs from his estrangement at the poem's beginning.

At the outset of the narrative, the source of Bob's separation is external; it consists chiefly of the type of work in which he has been

4 "David". Anon.rev., Canadian Author and Bookman, XIX (June, 1943), 16. 12.

engaged and the milieu surrounding it. At the conclusion of the

poem, the alienation, if it can be termed such, is self-willed;

the source is internal.

Viewed, therefore, in the light of Birney's poetry as a

whole, "David" is an early example of that approach to life which

places supreme emphasis on the worth and dignity of man in himself.

The difference between the Bob of the initial stanzas and the man

of the poem's conclusion consists of the individual's exercising,

freely and deliberately, his right of choice. The oppressive forces which drove both Bob and David to freedom in the mountains can be escaped and positively counteracted, as the poem illustrates. Temporarily

at least, their roots in nature are restored. Rather than return to a life of pallid existence, David chooses to die; rather than forsake

the friendship of David, Bob acquiec eG to his wishes. The resultant horror that Bob experiences is directly linked with his having sacrificed his communion with nature, desirable and necessary as it is, for a higher human good.

II

The remainder of the poems in the first volume can be variously classified as natural descriptions, poetry of war, and poetry depicting the evils of urban life. In each of these three categories, as in

"D av1. d" itself, there emerges the ever-present perilousness of existence.

To illustrate this point, let us take, for the purpose of analysis, several poems of each group, beginning with those that describe nature.

11Reverse on the Coast Range" depicts the destruction of 13. trees on the slope of a mountain by a spring avalanche. The growth which exists farther down the mountain-side nearer the sea is spared.

The poem begins:

Confidently in the higher valleys The hemlocks massed their heavy reserves, Shanking themselves with furze over tge years, Like mammoths hairy against the snow.

Other species of trees are described with the same military and war- like imagery; when the avalanche takes place, it too is pictured in the same way:

With a crack and the roar of a thousand howitzers, Out from the mountain's writhing camouflage Roared the full broadside of the enemy, The flooding and fanning avalanche, Bombing from the ledges the juniper outposts Shredding them down through the bursting snow, Down with the uptorn larch and the levelled firs, To dro\~ them deep with the hemlocks In implacable rocks and ice In the valley's vast obliteration. (11. 16-25)

At the conclusion of the poem, the glory and pride of these trees is see~ in all of its transitoriness:

Far away the dogwood heard and, clutching The dreams of their waxen vanities, Fled down the seaslopes To where a madrona tanned its lazy limbs In the sun, and oblivious maples Plaited within their quiet boles A million golden tassels for the spring. (p.l8, 11.26-32)

The effectiveness of the poem lies in the contrast between the last seven lines and what has gone before. The maples and the madrona are described as "oblivious" and "lazy" respectively, while the firs

5 Earle Birney, "Reverse on the Coast Range", David and Other Poems, p. 17, 11. 1-4. 14.

are "cool and spiked as flint arrowheads" (1.7) and the pines~

"straight and cold as gunbarrels" (1.10). The power of the pines and firs is suggested by the use of the harsh consonantal sounds,

"k", "t", and "g", in the latter two phrases and the abundant martial imagery in the poem as a whole. When the avalanche descends, it is with a "crack" and "roar"; when it strikes it is like a "broadside" salvo, "bombing", "shredding", and drowning all in its path. In contrast, · the maples plait "within their quiet boles" and the madrona tans "its lazy limbs".

While the weight of the poem in terms of line distribution is heavily descriptive of the military aspect of nature, the key to the poem's interpretation would appear to be in the smaller section. The image of the dogwood, their illusions shattered, fleeing to the environment of the madrona and maple, by contrast re-enforces the power so vigorously depicted earlier, and yet reveals the fragility of this power when pitted against a greater force such as that of the avalanche.

Two other poems, "October in Utah", and "Kootenay Still-life", also portray nature in terms of its inherent danger~ although neither ought to be interpreted as the poet's final statement on nature. The former describes the death of summer with an imagery that depicts the

shrewish she-wind ••• Convulsing the ochre aspens and leaving them glummer For half their leaves put to light sic~ y her gusty mouth.

Up from the roadway she conjures with cronish broom The squalling dust to engulf the unwary old man in the park .••• 15.

Down smites the rain on the roofs, and the autumn dims on The mountain •••• Slain is our summer, pulseless and chil1.6

As in "Reverse on the Coast Range", a natural event is depicted ln violent terms. The agent of violence here, however, is not an avalanche, but the south wind personified as a witch. Instead of the vanity of the soldier-like trees, it is summer which is destroyed.

Within both these poems the potential dangers of nature are actualized and vividly described. In "Kootenay Still-life", however, the scene is, as the title would suggest, an externally serene one. But the element of danger is no less present, for it is latent within the description; here, too, nature is subject to its own vagaries. The poem reads:

Columning up from crisscross rot (Palmed flat by a wind forgotten) Breathes a single bullpine, naked For fifty cinnabar feet, then shakes At the valley a glittering fist of needles Rivergreen. And stops, headless.

On the yellow fang of the bullpine's broken Neckbone sits, eyeing her mouse below, A crow. 7

It is interesting to note that in the three poems of this first group, nature and particular occurrences within nature are never described in merely bucolic fashion. There is an emphasis upon the precarious element in the world of nature, be it potential

6 Birney, ''October in Utah", David, p.l9, 11.2-6; 15-16. 7 Birney, "Kootenay Still-life", David, p.22. 16. or actual. All three poems, moreover, attribute human qualities to nature. In "Reverse on the Coast Range" the trees are personified as soliders; in "October in Utah" the wind is viewed as a crone;

"Kootenay Still-life" sustains an image of the pine as breathing,

11naked", shaking a fist, and "headless". In these poems nature is used as the matrix for Birney's theme of the perilousness of existence.

The poems of war and the poems of urbanization parallel and echo the conflict and danger of the more descriptive natural verse. In order to emphasize the horrors of war and the ills of urbanization, however, the more serene aspect of nature, peaceful and untainted,is stressed.

At this juncture, before treating these two themes, it may be well to emphasize that the classifications along thematic lines are not intended to be mutually exclusive. The more obvious poems fall rather easily into one or another of these groups; others, not so sharply delineated by their subject matter, may be placed some­ what arbitrarily under one or more of the headings. For the writer of this thesis, the selection and classification has been dictated by what seemed to him to be the emphasis of any one poem. Thus, a particular work may speak of both war and the evils o£ sophisticated life in the city; usually, within the context of the poem, one of these two themes seems more important than the other. To facilitate analysis and to avoid needless repetition, therefore, the afore­ mentioned system of classification has been made use of.

Viewed as individual poems or as part of a general mosaic, those poems of Birney which deal with either war or urbanization are 17. never part of an abstract philosophical system. Always the immediate concern is with real people and real events and the delicate balance that is maintained between life and death, war and peace, serenity and disturbance.

One of the finest of the war poems is "Dusk on English Bay", in which a view of the Gulf of Georgia becomes the occasion for a vision of a world in conflict. After describing the lights of the city, the smell of city life, bathers in the twilight, the stars and the moon, the poet writes:

Night's dissolvent eats into the west, Browning the stippled mauve, the copper sulphate, Paling and paling the opal, melting the latest Speck of robin's eggshell into the Gulf of Georgia, And ever over the Pacific pursuing tomorrow's Sun.8

At this point, the placid descriptive tone of the poem alters:

But tomorrow's sun is clean excaped And rushes down through Asian skies, garish With burst of shell and unarrested rocket, And burns on Libyan sands, by bombs Cratered and red with libations poured to the guns. (11. 20-24.)

Speeding and soaring he comes, the Atlantic sighting, And there is no Joshua can brake his flight, nor Any clutch of ours can hold this precious night. (p.31, 11.32-34.)

In the poem as a whole and in the latter half of the poem in part- icular, the controlling image is that of the sun and the sights it must see on its daily journey. The peace and serenity of an evening on the west coast of Canada is interrupted by the intrusion of war

8B. 1.rney, "Dusk on English Bay", David, p.30, 11.15-20. 18.

and death, because the sun serves as the vehicle for a vision

that transcends the immediate locale. Thus, the progression from

the first part of the poem to the second is smooth and unobtrusive;

a number of verbal parallels relate what the poet sees immediately before him to the vision of the sun which he attains:

Through the popcorn Reek, hotdogs and chips, the air lets fall A rain of quiet coolness on the flesh. (11.2-4 ... )

and the rain of iron Cooling the flesh, and the stench of the flesh cooled, (p.31, 11.29-30.)

The calling Bathers trot the footpocked sand on legs Unsexed by distance, waving arms severed With twilight. (11.4-7.) tomorrow's sun Is flying ••• widening his light On limbs unsexed and severed, (pp.30-31, 11.25-29, passim.)

From the whitening ribs of the raft divers _;. Flash cream arcs across the expiring Sunset, and are quenched. (11. 7-9.) Past Narvik's blanching hulks tomorrow's sun Is flying, over the Mediterranean's smudged Embattled sharks, and the sailors quenched, (11. 25-27.)

If, as the concluding lines of the poem suggest, the flight of the sun could be arrested, then the scene before the poet might be cherished in itself. But here too, as in "David", the beauties of nature are ambiguous; they can no longer merely be seen and appreciated. Through them the imagination of the poet effects an 19.

awareness of the less than tranquil milieu of the world at the time.

To this end the internal movement or sense of the poem is swift, with one scene blending almost imperceptibly into the next. Structurally,

the abundance of rove-over lines impels the verse forward, in keeping with the motion that the poet attributes to the sun.

Other war poems variously portray the rebellion of a nation oppressed ("France 1941"), the desire of man to seek what is good and

just ("On Going to the Wars"), the feeling of desolation of an invaded people ("European Nocturne"), and the effect of war upon nature itself

("War Winter"). This latter poem is particularly interesting because it illustrates the poet's conscious interest in Anglo-Saxon verse:

In some poems - notably fiAnglo-Saxon Street"­ he deliberately imitates Anglo-Saxon poetic techniques, using the alliterative line, the mid-line hiatus, and archaic words •••• More often the Anglo-Saxon influences are less obvious but equally real, and take the form of direct energy of expression, the sparing use of adjectivgs, and a sinewy litheness of verse movement.

Though we will not treat "Anglo-Saxon Street" until later in this section, much of what has been cited above is applicable to the poem presently under consideration. The text of "War Winter" reads:

SUN, proud Bessemer, peltwarmer, beauty, these weeks steer us to scan sky for you. The dun droppings blur, we drown in snow. Is this tarnished chimneyplug in a tenantless room, this sucked wafer, white simpleton, You?

9 Desmond Pacey, Creative Writing in Canada (Toronto, 1952), p.139. 20.

Not chiefly the month moulds you, heartcharmer, to scant hammerdent on hardiron sky, not alone the latitude to lodgers on this your slan t't~Thirling lackey, lifecrus ted satei!Jli te, this your one wrynecked, woedealing world. 1

The mid-line hiatus is evident from the typography of the printed

verses themselves. The effect of the break upon the line structure,

when the poem is read aloud, is to give greater stress to each half-

line. The emphasis thus produced is re-enforced by the alliterative

"p's" and "b's'' of the second line, the "s" and "sk's" of the third,

and so on. The habit of word combination, to a large extend neologism,

adds a terseness and strangeness in keeping with the abrupt nature of

the caesura! pause; witness the presence of "peltwarmer", "chimneyplug",

and ''heartcharmer'' .

The unification of the two sections of the poem is achieved

partially through the question and answer structure of the poem itself,

although the answer must be inferred from what is said. In addition,

the opening lines of the second stanza sustain the image of the sun as

"Bessemer"; the use of "moulds .. , "hammerdent", and "hardiron" continues

the metaphor relating to the Bessemer process with which the poem is introduced.

In a manner that is at once traditional and novel, the poem

suggests a picture of a world that is fraught with anxiety and trouble.

Nature itself, represented by the sun, is degraded. Presumably, however, nature is debased only insofar as there are men to wage wars and men to

see the havoc that war brings to nature.

10 Birney, "War Winter", David, p.33, 11.1-12. 21.

In the war poems and the poems of description the defined polarities appear to be man and nature. It bas been observed that in the former, war and the effects of war taint even the most tranquil and remote of natural scenes, while ~n the latter, natural occurrences are depicted in hostile human terms. The third group of poems deals more explicitly with the confrontation of civilized urban man and untouched primeval nature. While not always stating anything startlingly original, the poetry treated below speaks to modern man in twentieth-century terms and almost always has as its frame of reference the all-perasive ambiguity of existence.

Within this third and largest group of poems, some present the squalor of life in the city and others are given over to the simple pleasures of nature; yet other poems present a confrontation of these two within their own bounds. One of the finest of this latter type is the sonnet "Grey Rocks " :

Webbed hands of balsam soothed the shore that night, Consoling with a labouring tide, which stirred With its dark timeless pain, and swelling, blurred Grey rock and air into the sea, and might Have pulled the hills into its level flight Had not the mummy moon leaned down to splash Her immemorial gay quicksilver sash Across the withered travail of the bight.ll

This octave not only describes a particular scene, but also evokes a mood of restlessness. There is beauty depicted, but it is a beauty in which the shore is " soothed" and consoled by a " labouring tide" .

The physical point of view which we as readers imagine is one from

llB. 1rney, " Grey Rocks " , David, p.20, 11.1-8. 22.

which the sea, shore, and rocks seem to blend into one. It is only

by the light of the moon~ with her "quicksilver sash", that the

distinguishing features of the landscape assume their natural forms.

The dominant impression of the scene is one of continuity; the tide

itself and the locale lend themselves to such an impression. More-

over, from the point of view of technique, we might observe that

paralleling the fluidity of the scene itself is the presence of

several enjambed lines (11.2,3,4,6).

In contrast to the quiet mood of the octave, the initial four

and one-half lines of the sestet contain the noises of man's intrusion:

Into the saga bobs the nervous, lean Lament of ukuleles, and the choke And belching of a motor. Voices wail Laconic time. Has an-y bod-y SEEN My ••• gal ••• ? (11. 9-13)

The diction here is deliberately chopped and terse: "bobs", "lean",

"nervous", "choke", all convey the impression of alien man's presence.

Adding to the effect of the diction is the ruptured movement of the

song the intruders are singing; to convey this, the typography is

hesitant and uneven. While the lines here are enjambed, the movement

of the verse is retarded by the cryptic monosyllabic language and the

broken structure of the song. The resultant tension of the sestet is

resolved in the concluding lines:

The cut sash heals. The shores invoke Once more the old tide's mumbled gnawing tale. (11. 13-14)

The summary nature of these lines is an aspect of Birney's technique 23.

. . . d 12 for which he has been cr1t1c1ze • They do serve, however, to restore the original mood of the poem without being overtly didactic.

Following so closely upon the picture of man, they emphasize the transitory nature of the intrusion in contrast with the "timeless pain" of the old tide and the "immemorial" sash of the moon.l3

Occasionally in Birney's poetry there appears a specific identification of the evils of urbanization with one region of the country, as when he associates Ontario with much that is sterile in modern society. In an assertion of loyalty to his western homeland the poet longs to escape to the simple life and "Eagle Island":

I've had enough of this inert Ontario, this eunuch sea And pastured fenced nonentity. I'm off to where a seafresh sun Slants golden warmth at dawn across Thvarfed Jurassic woods of moss And olive lichens plaited firm Upon a knobbly island's pelt,l4

This rather long Canadian version of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" ends with the couplet:

I'll steal to Eagle Island first And slake my salt Columbian thirst. (p.25, 11.89-90)

Birney" Poet", British Columbia Library 1960), 12.

poem that, like "Grey Rocks", presents man in the role of intruder is ''Honody on a Century". The concluding lines read: Now bud is rot and fragrance rust Around the martialled bees, And men with boots will put an end To making similes. (p.27, 11.9-12) 14 Birney, "Eagle Island", David, p.23, 11. 1-8 24.

The poet, h O"tveve r , l.·s not unaware that contemporary man bas also afflicted his own area of the country; in "West Vancouver Ferry" he writes: The ferry slides, then veers to buck The gleaming midstream tidal rip, Leaving the bobbing cans and ruck Of sawdust, butts, and fly-kissed slaughterl5

Within some of Birney's poems, sometimes explicitly expressed, is the desire not merely to escape the noise and ruck of modern living but to return to something primeval and untainted. The ills of con- temporary civilization, brought about by man himself, threaten to make him insensible of the roots in nature which he once had and which were a part of his life. In one poem, "Hands", the narrator expresses his alienation from nature in this manner:

Too bewildering Even in the dead days of peace was this manumission, The leaves' illogical loveliness. Now am I frustrate, Alien. Here is the battle steeped in silence, The fallen have use and fragrantly nourish the quick. My species would wither, away from the radio's barkings, The headline beating its chimpanzee breast, the nimble Young digits at levers and triggers.l6

What follows throughout the remainder of the poem is a contrasting of the hands of nature-the leaves of the trees-and the hands of man.

The concluding lines read:

We are not of these woods, we are not of these woods, Our roots are in autumn, and store for no spring. (p.29, 11.38-39)

15 Birney, "West Vancouver Ferry", David, p.l6, 11.19-22 16 Birney.~ "Han d s n , David, p.28, 11.5-1 2 • 25.

Here, explicitly stated, is the estrangement of man from the world of

nature. While much of the imagery of the poem relates to the war in

Europe, the war can be viewed as part of the barren environment that

man has created. Two poems, "Anglo-Saxon Street" and "Slug in Woods", provide,

when taken together, a contrast between the world of man and the world

of nature. The former, as was mentioned earlier, is written in the

Anglo-Saxon verse structure; it depicts the squalor of existence in

a war-torn English city. The latter is a detailed description of one

of the slowest of nature's creatures. "Slug in Woods" makes no attempt

even at implicit didacticism. Given the polarities that they represent--

the world of man and the world of nature--let us proceed to a closer

analysis of the poems themselves.

Both "Slug in Woods" and "Anglo-Saxon Street" present a temporal

progression to the reader. The movement of the slug is laborious,

yet patient:

Hours on, he will resume his silver scrawl, illume his palimpsest, emboss his diver's line across that waving green illim­ itable seafloor.l7

Antithetical to this slowness is the following description of working men released from their labours:

What! after whistleblow, spewed from wheelboat, after daylong doughtiness, dire handplay in sewertrench or sandpit, come Saxonthegns, Junebrown Jutekings, jawslack for meat.18

1 ?Birney, "Slug in Woods", David, p.l3, 11.13-18. 18 Birney, "Anglo-Saxon Streetn, David, p.15, 11.33-36. 26.

The conclusions of both poems are consonant with the description

employed throughout each: here again the contrast is noteworthy.

The final line of nslug in Woods" reads:

So spends a summer's jasper century. (1.30)

And "Anglo-Saxon Street" ends:

Slumbers now slumtrack, unstinks~ cooling~ waiting brief for milkhind, mornstar and worldrise. (11.48-49)

The contrast between the two poems is not limited only to the sense or content of either. The description of the slug is sustained and re-enforced by an imagery as closely worked and detailed as the minute subject matter demands:

For eyes he waves greentipped taut horns of slime. They dipped hours back, across a reef, a salmonberry leaf. (11.1-4)

The metaphor of the reef introduces the marine element~ which pro- vides the vehicles for further imagery relating to the ocean. We have cited lines in which the slug is compared to a diver on the seafloor. Unobstrusively, the nautical images continue:

Slim young jay his sudden shark; the wrecks he skirts are dark and fungussed firlogs, whom spirea sprays enplume~ encoral. (11.18-23)

while mounting boles foretell of isles in dappled air fathoms above his care. Azygous his viscid wife, foodward he noses cold beneath his sea. (11.24-29) 27.

From such a detailed description we may presume that the poet

considers even t he humblest of nature's creatures worthy of his imaginative and poetic powers; the fact that the poem exists attests

to this inference. There is no declaration of the beauty of what

the poet sees, no didacticism of any kind; the poem, rather, is

extremely simple, for the movement of the slug is consistently

portrayed in the dominant marine imagery.

Similarly, the diction and imagery of "Anglo-Saxon Street"

support the theme of the squalor of life in' an environment that man has created. The poet uses the older verse form while combining modern words and phrases in a manner that graphically depicts the street as he views or imagines it. The following passages show the unifying time sequence of the poem and, at the same time, provides further examples of alliteration, neologism, and mid-line hiatus-the better known features of Anglo-Saxon verse:

DAWNDRIZZLE ended, dampness steams from blotching brick and blank plasterwaste (p.14, 11.1-2)

Stained pane, inset on slattern street, announces blue noon for gnatclouds and sparrows, while dustsodden drops still drip from talkstrings. (11.13-15)

Ho! with climbing sun, heading from cocoons, go bleached beldames, garnished in bargainbasements, (11.24-25)

Hoy! 1:•'ith suns lope, shrieking over hydrants, flood from learninghall the lean fingerlings · (p .15, 11. 29-30)

Sit after supper on smeared doorsteps, (1.37) 28.

Home again to hotbox and humid husbandhood, in slumbertrough adding sleepily to Anglekin. (11, 43-44)

The concrete Anglo-Saxon diction is particularly effective when it

is used in some rather unusual metaphors or kennings. The street

itself is referred to as a "tarred truckchannel" (1. 9); flowing debris

in the street is a rrbuttriver" (1.27); as cited above, the telephone

wires are quite literally designated as "talkstrings".

Elsewhere the Anglo-Saxon verse form becomes the instrument

of the poet's irony, as when the subject of racial prejudice is intro-

duced; 11 lmperial hearts" find their "haven" in the squalor, though no

Negroes or Je'tvS are admitted, and the war slogans serve a more practical

purpose than inspiring patriotism:

Here is a ghetto gotten for goyim, 0 with care denuded of nigger and kike. No coonsmell rankles, reeks only cellarrot, ottar of carexhaust, carcorpse and cookinggrease. Imperial hearts heave in this haven, Cracks across windows are welded with slogans; There'll Always Be An England enhances geraniums, and V's for a Victory vanquish the housefly. (11.16-23)

The filth and degradation of the streets and the people who live on it

are here ironically paralleled by a more non-material vileness. The

irony is perhaps too obvious, however, and for this reason its effect­

iveness is reduced.

"Slug in Woods" and 11 Anglo-Saxon Street" exemplify the attention

to detail that ;s~ the hallmark o f B1rney· ' s poet1.c· teeh n1.que.· Such a statement is not intended as a value judgment praising all of his poetry.

The success or failure of Birney's work as a whole is dependent upon a 29.

consideration of individual works in themselves. What the two

sections of this chapter have endeavoured to illustrate is that

the poetic interests of Earle Birney, as manifested in his first

volume of poetry, show a humanistic concern for the fate and condition

of man. Simultaneously, man is seen in all of his smallness and in

all of his greatness:

We are a spark beleaguered by darkness ••• Yet we must speak, we the unique glowworms.l9

Frequently, as we have seen, nature plays an important role in por-

traying the conflict and ambiguity of existence. When such is the case, man's life and the environment he has created are defined and described in relationship to it; occasionally, too, nature receives

its definition from the world of man, as in the war poems.

In the chapter that follows, we shall consider in more detail the poetry relating to war and its effect on the human spirit. The source for the material will be the volume entitled Now is Time, published in 1945.

19B.1rney, " Vancouver Lights", David, pp.36-37, 11. 19-25, passim. Chapter 111

Now is Time 31.

In this chapter, the war poems of the volume entitled

Now is Time will he treated. Excluded from the discussion are

those works which are reprinted from the previous volume, David and Other Poems. Now is Time is divided into three main sections:

"Tomorrow " , ''Y· es t er d ay " , and "Today". The plan of what follows has been dictated by the temporal division of the poetry itself under these headings. The subject of war is to be seen in the context of the poet's treatment of the human condition which has been intro- duced in the previous chapter.

The first division of the volume is the "Tomorrow" section.

It contains five poems, all of which are pervaded by a sense of urgency and impending disaster; the urgency and threatening doom have their source in the poet's realization that time, for man, may be running out. Men must alter the present course of events if the world of tomorrow is to be free from armed conflict and its attendant horrors.

Even though individual men may not survive to reap the fruits of what they sow, the effort to .achieve peace must be made, if there is to be any hope for tomorrow. The poem entitled "Lines for a Peace" sets the tone not only for the first section but also for the entire volume; the concluding lines read:

The hours flash below the sun and space is now and now is time to bed the beast and with the pain of love shock him to the brain­ then certify the future sane. 1

The beast of war can only be negated by love; any course of action that relies upon the use of armed ml.g. h t is insane:

1 Earle Birney, "Lines for a Peace", Now is Time (Toronto, 1945), p.S, 11.16-20. 32.

This heart's a bud that can explode to flower no gun has puffed~ our only governor to check the paranoidal climb. (11.12-15)

It is interesting to note here that the diction of the poem reinforces the notion of a future devoid of meaning and normality if love is not present : 11 paranoidal11 and ncertify the future sane" stress the in­ sanity of war for 'tvhich the "pain of love tr is the only cure. So inimical to war is love, in fact, that it is compared to a shock treat- ment, at once painful and salutary.

The emphasis that the poet places upon the curative properties of love in "Lines for a Peace .. is supported by an emotional plea for brotherhood in "Time-Bomb". The first and last stanzas of the poem continue the animal imagery introduced in the earlier work:

IN this friend's face I know the grizzly still~ and in the mirror; lay my ear to the radio's conch and hear the atom's terror.2

Within our politician's ribs~ within my own, the time-bombs tick. 0 men be swift to be mankind or let the grizzly take. (11.9-12)

The effectiveness of the poem and especially the humanistic plea that is made in the second to last line appear considerably diminished by the final line itself. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the i d ea o f war as the alte r native to broth erhood and love is e x pre ssed too succinctly; it may also be that the image of the bear as an instrument of v1"olence 1s· stereotype d • Whatever the cause for the

2B. 1rney , "T 1me-· Bom b ,. , Now is Time, p • 6 ' 11 . 1-4 • 33. relatively poor quality of the poem, it is undoubtedly less "L-tnes for a Peace", though the thematic continuity effective than ..... e second stanza, the best of the three, the poet is sustaine d • In th sees the evils of war in nature: In each high stalk of wheat I watch osmotic rise of blood; through nightsky see new firedrakes hosed with light and lead. (11.5-8)

Here, the spilt blood of men is seen figuratively as nurturing the growth of wheat; the absorption through osmosis into the stalks from the earth gives an accurate reading of the level of violence and death. The Anglo-Saxon "firedrakes" or fire-dragons seems a most appropriate image for the picture of war in the sky. In order to avoid an overt lilting and melodic auditory effect in such a short poem, the poet suppresses the rhyme throughout the traditional a-b- c-b scheme. In the penultimate stanza he uses the consonantal "blood"/

"lead" and in the last the imperfect "tick"/"take".

As has been indicated, the poet's answer to the precariousness of human existence as manifested in war and the possibility of war is love and human friendship. More specific aspects of these latter two ideals are presented in the poems "Status Quo" and "Man on a Tractorn.

In the former, greed, prejudice, poverty, and war are concomitant effects of one cause - selfishness:

This mouth we teach to speak first of itself alone will conjure back the Belsen breath and raise a town of bone.3

3B. 1 rney, "Status Quo", ______Now is Tim_e_, p. 3 , 11 • 21 - 24 • 34.

s diametrically opposed to the main impetus of The status quo i the entire volume, for to the mind's eye of the poet it represents all that is passive and inert; there must exist a desire on the part of men to attain to something beyond the absence of war. If

this desire does not exist, then men will return to a world that is not aware of the meaning of altruism or love:

NOl\" every spraying syllable veneering private gain shall gloss another farmboy for the toy-display of gain. (11.1-4)

In "Man on a Tractor" we have just the farmboy spoken of above in line three. The poet presents the thoughts of a man who has returned from war; he is one whose vision of the future is intermingled with reminiscences of war and the past. Former poverty, unemployment, and the death of his brother all force their way into his consciousness. Yet it is not the unpleasantness of the past that disturbs him:

No there are no contortions of war that haunt him so much, he thinks, as the lengthening shadows of peace.4

As the poem continues, the meaning of the lines becomes clearer:

This willing soil, and all his muscles, kindly seasons, the faith of a \-life and the sweat of coming sons will not win, if the far lords of profit and price deny them. (11.41-43)

The man on the tractor symbolizes so many men who returned from the war, and indeed, all men who share in the fears for tomorrow which are part of human ex;stence.~ Be f ore t h e poem cone1 u d es, t h ere l.S· a

4 Birney , 11]\rf an on a Tractor " , Now is Time, p.8, 11.34-35. 35.

licit statement of the meaning of love and brotherhood, most exp reduced to the simple yet profound terms of a farmer:

Could he know that the crops from these smoking furrows, the ache in his back, the smile of his bride, were lines in the map of a reasoned future, of lands without private traps, or hidden mortars of class, or flame from the sky, then could he sit resolute on this tractor as once in a tank, and the bones of his brother have meaning. (p.lO, 11.91-96)

There is a correspondence between such thoughts as these and the structure that the poem takes. The penetrating simplicity of the musings of the farmer finds its expression in a heavily-stressed free verse. There are hints of rimes from time to time, but no regular pattern exists; the imagery is scant and limited to such phrases as

"the giant nostril of war" (p.7, 1.26) and "the peacock Americans"

{p.9, 1.57). Relatively free of ornamentation, "Man on a Tractor" expresses "the deep desire of the common man ••• meditating as he ploughs his prairie wheatfield-for peace and justice."S

In the last poem of the "Tomorrow" section which will be treated here, the speaker of the lines is death. Since death is inevitable and comes to all men, it is the interval between birth and death that is important, although considered from the cold objective point of view of death, it really makes little difference when men die.

5 (S Brian Elliott, '*Earle Birney: Canadian Poet", Meanjin, J8 eptember, 1959), 343. While Elliott's analyses of individual poems are s t. . a 11 ome ~mes st~mulating, I cannot agree that Birney posses i:e ea~y nati?nal optimism" (p.338), although Elliott himself real- s t at nat1onalism is not a criterion for judging Birney's or any poet's work. 36.

The difference is picayune scarcely a notch on the indicator, whether the young men come with me now or a few years later.6

The anti-climactic rhyme in line four stresses the offhand nature of death's remarks and emphasizes his indifference. If death were the only reality, then wars would not be really import- ant, in that men killed are only claimed somewhat earlier than is customary. The true meaning of the poem is revealed in the final stanza: Continue to grow, if you wish, your dusty bushes of bombs or suck the shell's dug in your mouth - or come with paresis and psalms. (11.13-16)

In matter-of-fact language these lines present men the choice of living as they wish; they may produce instruments of war and be weaned on them. The alternative that death offers is to come to him in a state of mental aberration and abnormality, yet reciting psalms as in a procession. The juxtaposition of "paresis" and

"psalms" tends to underscore the objectivity of death and the fact that psalm-singing does not negate its inevitability; the "paresis" of men requires a palliative and the psalms serve such a purpose.

While it would be false to consider the rather callous remarks of death as the final statement of the poet on the meaning of existence, they do emphasize the finality of dying. Taken in the context of "Status Quo" and "Man on a Tractor", the commentary of death is placed ~~n its proper perspective.

6 Birney, "Remarks for the Part of Death", Now is Time, p.4, 11.1-4. 37.

In the poems just discussed the emphasis has been upon

men and war. The security of the future and the freedom of man from war reside in man's will to change, to live a life in which

the motivating forces are love, selflessness and brotherhood.

Because man is not immortal the urgency of the situation becomes

apparent. If man is to go to his death having not merely survived,

but lived, then he must act now. In the "Yesterday11 section, the

thoughts, emotions and sustaining motives of men actually in the war

situation are examined. The number of poems in the section precludes a detailed analysis of each one individually. Certain works, there-

fore, will receive more extensive treatment than others; it is in no way implied that those necessarily neglected are of any less significance

than those selected for closer scrutiny.

A number of the poems in this "Yesterday" group are united by the motif of remembrance of friends and loved ones in the past. The more gruesome aspects of war are made bearable by the memory of a kind deed, a loving face, or a soothing voice; in "The Road to Nijmegen", for instance, the only consolation in war is the hope that such people as the narrator remembers will continue to exist. Of the poems which explicitly mention the remembrance of times past, the first that we

ill consider is "Cadet Hospital". The narrator describes the sights and sounds that press upon h.1m as he lies in a hospital bed:

I LISTEN to the susurration of taxis sliding into the little holes of silence between the flak of our idiot radios. The. hale roll past , who were our comrades·, t h 1s night the dance, the graduation tomorrow, then the far shores and the devil's forge.7

7

Birney, "Cadet Hospital", _____Now is Time, ___;.~ · p.21, 11. 1-6. 38.

The alliterative sibilants of the initial lines convey the drone of the taxis from the streets and indicate the awareness that one has of alien noises in a hospital. The noise of war is introduced by the metaphor relating the radio and flak and in the last line cited, the "devil's forge" captures the fear and expectation of the future that is soon to become a reality for the young cadets. Soon, however, the noises fade:

Now the cacophony somehow melts in the mead of a voice remembered. I shut my eyes and find the gentian of yours, and the gnawing under the cast is quieted by a touch from the past. (11.10-14)

Here the mood abruptly changes; the harsh sounds of "flak" and 11 idiot" are momentarily continued in the onomatopoeic ncacophony", but the initial "m's" of nmelts" and "mead" and the medial "m's" of "remembered"

ffect the softness of sound associated with pleasant memories. It is on this tone that the poem concludes; the present recollection of a

oved one gives rise to an act of thanksgiving:

I shall never repay you for being alive somewhere out in this warm sweet night. (11.15-16)

In a poem entitled "For Steve", the poet stresses once again

he value of past friendship and reaffirms the necessity for selflessness,

hich he introduced first in "Status Quo". The poem opens:

I 'll S1t. d own again, Steve, with your shy ghost; many a night we'll talk of books or fishing, down a beer and slide our smothering toes from drillboots. We'll damn Canadian politicians and argue schemes to weld the human fissures that cleave the lanky land from which we grew. 39.

we'll reconnoitre confidences and lost wishes, and I'll come closer both to charity and truth, those hours, for sitting even with the shade of you.8

The remaining stanzas lament the death of the airman Steve, stress

the ignorance Of t hose who do not understand the cause for which he died, and portray the yoke of war which Europe must bear. A random

sampling of lines will serve to illustrate the more horrid aspects

of war. In describing the condition of Eurpoe, the poet writes:

For you fall in a season of falling, in Europe's monstrous unending autumn, in the days when the earth sings like a mating frog, and squats to spit its long deft tongue and flick the frail brief wings. (p.31, 11.55-58)

The fact that the death of his friend Steve is but one of many

occasions the following:

No chimes of solace can achieve the decibels required for this one loss, still less for siren powered to sound all clear to all your fellows, Saxon or Anglosaxon, Tolstoy's kin or Raphael's. (p.30, 11.50-54)

Wherein, then, does the death of Steve receive its purpose and why did he die? The poet writes:

Not for the dole, the family patent, the cartel, the abattoir whitewashed for each crop of earthlings, but for a peace, distant maybe as Arcturus, yet spinning white in the telescope of the heart. (p.32, 11.105-108)

It is the possibility of peace and the everpresent hope for peace that motivated ~teve. Th . ~ e 1nitial lines of the last stanza memorably transfer the burden of responsibility for peace to us, the survivors:

8 Birney, "For s teve II , Now is Time, p.29, 11.1-9. 40.

I think you breathed the future and you died of it and there alone's catharsis. No seed of ho;e can sprout but from the wounded side of selflessness. Since you who walked in freedom and the ways of reason fought on our front, we foresee the plot is solvable, the duel worthy. (p.33, 11.109-114)

The poem concludes on the note that until we do learn something from the death of Steve, then the degraded state of the world will continue to worsen: :Heantime our stage will pile with poisoned years until we tell aright the prince's words,9 and blood as proud as yours has built a prouder world. (11.115-117)

While there is no dominant image sustained throughout the thirteen stanzas of the poem, the concluding lines echo the reference to the stage and theatre made in the second stanza; the text of the latter reads:

So here's no exorcizing. Mine the stagehand's dream to funnel wires into a magnavox, and lay the wires from your fading voice beneath the platform to the guards and the forgetful heir, blasting the porches of the ears with "Swear," "Swearrr and "Remember me." Forgive the haste, the horne mechanics, prentice insulation; plays of blood revenge are all the rage again, and other spectres crowd us off the stage. (p.29, 11.10-18) These lines assume particular importance when viewed in retrospect, following a reading of the poem's ending. If "plays of blood revenge

re all the rage" then 1t. 1s . on1 y through people such as Steve

9 This may possibly be explained as an allusion to Hamlet's speech to Horatio:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw they breath in pain, To tell my story. (Hamlet, V, ii, 359-362) 41.

that they are to be replaced. Analysis of the final stanza reveals

11 the presence of "catharsis", "plot", "stage , and "blood". Thus, while not a dominant image, the world as stage is an important one, particularly when all that intervenes between the second and last stanzas is viewed as in some way depicting the bloodier aspects of revenge tragedy. The metre of the poem is a flexible one, varying from four to seven accented feet per line, usually in an iambic pattern; here also, as in so many of Birney's poems, the varied metre is combined with a variety of perfect and imperfect rimes.

The third poem to be considered under the heading of the remembrance of things past is "The Road to Nijmegen", perhaps, the finest work of the second volume. The poem begins:

DECEMBER, my dear, on the road to Nijmegen, between the stones and the bitter skies was your face.lO

Immediately, with these lines, the subject is broached and the con- trast is established: the narrator is travelling on the road to Nijmegen and the bleakness of the landscape is contrasted with the memory of a loved one. The effectiveness of the beginning is due partially to the inversion of the word order in the second line and partially to the cryptic elliptical syntax. The verses immediately following line two vividly portray the squalor of a war-torn countryside:

At first only the gathering of graves along the lank canals, each with a frosted billy-tin for motto; the bones of tanks beside the stoven bridges; old men in the mist

10Birney, "Road to Nijmegen", Now is Time, p.42, 11.1-2. 42.

knifing chips from a boulevard of stumps; or women riding into the wind on the rims of their cycles, like tattered sailboats tossing over the cobbles. (11.3-9)

Death, destruction, old age and degradation are thereby captured in a series of striking images. The poet writes, not of a cemetery,

11 but of a "gathering of graves , implying perhaps the rather hasty and haphazard method of interment; the vowels and "l's" of "along the lank canals" extend . the physical shape of the canals, particularly their length, into the phrase itself; tin cans are the only memorial to those who have died and the skeletons of tanks and destroyed bridges continue the imagery of death. The "old men in the mist", as they gather chips for their fires, evoke a mood of pathos, while the women on their bicycles seem to be as aimless as "tattered sailboats". But the horrors portrayed here are but a prelude to the picture of war's effect on the children of Holland:

These at first, and the fangs of homes, but more the clusters of children, like flies, at the back of mess­ huts, or groping in gravel for knobs of coal, their legs standing like dead stems out of their clogs. (11.10-13)

The children are at once reduced to the status of having to beg for their food and gather fuel as best they can. Already they seem to share in the lifelessness of their wooden shoes.

At this point, the poem assumes a more personal tone; the war is still present, but the descriptive nature of the lines cited above gives way to reflection on the purpose of the narrator's involvement in the "rar: 43.

Numbed on the long road to mangled Nijmegen, I thought that only the living of others assures Yi; we remember the gentle and true as trees walking, as the men and women whose breath is a garment about us; that we who are stretched now in this tomb of time may remount like Lazarus into the light of kindness by a hold in the hands of the kind. (11.14-20)

While the personal memories continue, as above, the realities of war are never far away; such phrases as "mangled Nijmegen" and the stark metaphor, uthis tomb or time", sustain the destruction and death of the earlier lines. Within the verses just cited, the men are given the courage to persevere, to continue through the war and the elements, by the memory of those they love; the numbness of the marching men is made easier to bear by the "garment" which is the breath of "gentle and true" men and women.

The concluding section of the poem particularizes the more general men and women spoken of in the previous lines:

And so in the sleet as we neared Nijrnegen, searching my heart for the hope of our minds, for the proof in the flesh of the words we wish, for laughter outrising at last the rockets, I saw the rainbow answer of you,

of you and your seed who, peopling the earth, would distil our not impossible dreamed horizon, and who, moving within the nightmare Now, give us what creed we have for our daily crimes, for this road that arrives at no future, for this guilt in the griefs of the old and the graves of the young. (pp.42-43, 11.21-32)

11An allusion to Mark 8: 22-26 in which the blind man at Bethsaida is given his sight. Before vision is re&tored completely he says: ' I see men as though they were trees, but walking about." v.24 The Holy ~ .. Bible (New York, 1957 1949 ), p.60. See also 1.13 cited above. 44.

Already known intellectually, the reason for the misery caused by war, or the rationale for war, is only brought home to the narrator by the particular "you" (1.25). It is in the possibility of a world without conflict and war, inhabited by real people, that the degrad- ation caused by war is bearable, though never justified or right.

Indeed, the closing references to "nightmare Now", "daily crimes",

''road that arrives at no future", "guilt", "griefs", and "graves" return one to the starkness of the description in the opening lines of the poem.

Another work on much the sam theme is "This Page l'1y Pigeon".

The initial lines recall the "nightmare Now" of "The Road to Nijmegen":

THIS page is my pigeon sailing out of the blasted Now to you, 2 my greenest past, my rivered future. 1

The pigeon, a metaphoric embodiment of the printed word of the poet, is a messenger of love:

See, round his leg snug, love's cylinder

come from this world of wild undoing from all this quarrel of iron and growth. (11.4-6)

The poet next describes the instruments of war through which the pigeon must pass on his flight:

Weaving by snake-pit of ack-ack and robot's roar-horror, up past the beautiful brutal

bombers floating like flakes of mica, leaps my faithful feathered one, soars through the haired and dirty clouds of war, cleaving cleanly the self-centred sky. (11.7-12)

12Birney, "This page My Pigeon", Now is Time, p.38, 11.1-3. 45.

Here we have the image of "the self-centred sky" being broken by the messenger of love; as in so many of the poems previously analyzed, love and selflessness are synonymous for the poet. In the lines that follow, the flight of the pigeon must carry it through a world that is indifferent to the dangers it must encounter:

Under apathetic suns and over the pointless ocean he arrows, off to the one unlosable loft. What does he say for me, what brings m¥ homer? (11.13-16)

The message that the pigeon, representative of the poet's thoughts, conveys is concerned with the remembrance of a loved one from the past. As in " The Road to Nijmegen" , where the narrator saw the

" rainbow answer of you" (1.25), the pigeon

Says that your voice still waters my memory, your eyes are leads to the wide light that will be. Swears you are part of the rightness of hills, the saneness of music and hemlocks.

Says the giraffish dockweed, loneliness, was lopped away long ago, burned in your vaulting fire when first you gardened me. Now this gyring windstorm of absence whirls ashes up only. (11.17-24)

It is interesting to note that in " The Road to Nijmegen" and "This Page

My Pigeon" the memory of people is inseparable from nature. The poet associates the pleasantness of people with those aspects of nature which give him joy. The conclusion of the poem sustains the bond and reiterates, as in " Cadet Hospital" , the value of remembered people and emotion:

Windseed is barren, takes no truehold in heart tendrilled tight with existence of you. (11.25-26) 46.

This concept of receiving relative security or at least consolation from "Yesterday" is continued in such poems as "Within these Caverned Days" and "Invasion Spring". War appears as a most grim reminder of the precariousness of human existence; the poems just discussed are concrete examples of the various thoughts~ moods, and emotions of men caught up in the reality of war, who must seize on to a concrete incident, an incident at least as real as the war around them, in order to survive. Chauvinism disguised as patriotism, avarice, and inherited prejudice are not palliated by being seen in the context of political, economic, or ethnic systems, but rather they are viewed as forces of evil which threaten real people in particular circumstances. Perhaps it is because the poet is only too aware of this reality that the poetry under consideration has such a sense of urgency and immediacy. As has been stated earlier, the poetry of

Earle Birney does not appear to manifest an inclination for abstract- ion or philosophical speculation; this is not to say that his poems are not universally applicable. A poem's universality derives from its being valid in particular circumstances. In the case of the war poems there is an ever-present fear for the future because was is always possible; it is part of the ambiguity and insecurity of man's state. In this sense, therefore, the war poetry transcends the time in which it was written, as indeed most of Binney's poems do. It is from the terrible experiences of that time, moreover, that the urgency and immediacy of the poetry receives its impetus.

Even the poems of the "Today" section of the volume are 47.

oriented toward the future. Although in these poems the war has

ended, the peace is a precarious one:

The fire of the people falls but over prairie and peak the grime of our living wreathes and appalls; the reeking smoke of our times clouds every peering eye, and the children's fists are smutted with history.l3

Later in the poem, the poet stresses once again the paradoKical

aspect of man's nature:

We of the Janus brain, the jiving killer-creators, warring as pismires, and breeding more careless than ripples, move and glister again from the heart's eclipse. (11.12-15)

Men's divided natures have their parallel in the divisions that exist among the various ethnic groups:

Like the girders of a great bridge rusting unassembled, obsecure in the dust of their stirring, lie the separate races of man. (11.24-27)

Returning once again to the theme of love, the poet remarks that peace cannot be merely a negative suspension of warring activities; bmt must be a vital positive force:

Still the heart is a metal vibrant to love in his lightning searches. Within yet trembles our will to move as electrons alert to his passage, to rise from our dirt and fulfill the architect's message.

If this thinning hate is all that hovers we are the blackened and the broken cables the flash of life leaps over. (p.54, 11.28-36)

13 Birney, "Death of a War", Nm.;r is Time, p.53, 11.1-6. 48.

In effect what the poet does in these concluding lines is to equate life and love; love is the true life force~ the animating principle. The image of electricity conveys the dynamism of love and the power that it possesses; it is in the ability of man~ in his will to be alert to the passage of love that the hope for the future lies. It does not lie in " thinning hate" alone~ for quiescent host- ilities are passive and inert. Love is the actualization of man's will to love and is essentially positive.

Thus~ because the decision to love rests with man, the future is uncertain:

The soldiers merge and move with all of us toward whatever mystery bemused that fatal pliant fish who first forgot the sea.l4 (11.19-22)

Whatever tomorrow holds~ however~ it cannot be avoided. As in 11 David"~ the path of the future depends upon the decisions man makes today; it is in his will to alter events that man's glory lies. This is true even if the choice, like Bob's, is a terrifying one. The inevitability of death does not obviate the perilousness of existence; in fact, man's greatest asset, his will, is inextricably bound to this ambiguity. Love and hatred, war and peace, define the choice that he must make; it is only in choosing love iand peace now that he truly possesses life and not a mere waiting for death. No better summary of what has been said thus far in this chapter can be given than the words of Birney himself in the

14 11 Birney, " Young Veterans , Now is Time, p.55~ 11.19-22. 49. last poem of Now is Time - "World Conference":

THE quiet diesel in the breast propels a trusting keel whether we swing toward a port or crocodiles of steel.

The compassed m~nd must quiver north though every ~hart defective; there is no fog but in the will, the iceberg is elective.l5

15 Birney, "World Conference", Now is Time, p.56. Chapter lV

The Strait of Anian and

Trial of a City 51.

In the first section of the chapter that follows, we shall examine a representative selection of the poetry in the volume The

Strait of Anian. The second section will contain a discussion of

Trial of a City and various aspects of Earle Birney's experiment- ation with the language of poetry. It has seemed appropriate to introduce this latter subject at this point for the reason that Trial of a City sustains the thematic continuity of Birney's poetry and, at the same time, represents a new genre for the poet. Trial of a City, coming as it does midway in the poet's publications to date, serves as a vantage point from which to view the Anglo-Saxon verse of the past \ and the experimental nature of some of the poems in the succeeding volumes.

I

The Strait of Anian is a volume of selected poems published in

1948. It contains both old and new poems and it is to these latter that we shall turn our attention here. The verse continues to manifest the poet's emphasis upon the perilous condition of man and the glory of man's ability to alter events, to shape the future by using his will.

Two poem's in particular, "Mappemounde" and "Ulysses", echo these sentiments and perpetuate the themes of such poems as "World Conference",

"David", and "Time-Bomb. 11

"Mappemounde" is a short statement of the dangers that surround us as men: The opening lines read:

NO not this old whalehall can whelm us, shiptamed, gullgraced, soft to our glidings. 1 Harrows that mere more that squares our map.

!Birney, "Mappemounde", The Strait of Anian (Toronto, 1948), p.4, 11.1-3. 52.

Immediately a contrast is initiated between the sea proper and another, as yet unidentified, sea. The ocean itself is depicted as an element of nature with which man is able to cope. "The mere that squares our map" is later identified as time: ' That sea is hight

Time, it hems all hearts' landtrace'1 (1.11). In their journey through life, men are surrounded by dangers symbolized by the mermen who lure the "seafarer's girl", nadders that with their funeral fires consume all happiness and joy, and Cetegrande:2

that sly beast who sucks in with whirlwind also the wanderer's pledges. (11.9-10)

Despite the dangers that threaten us as men, we are obliged to proceed with our lives and exist with the hazards of time:

Men say the redeless, reaching its bounds, topple in maelstrom, tread back never. Adread in that mere we drift to map's end. (11.12-14)

" Mappemounde" continues the Anglo-Saxon verse form that we have examined earlier. The rhythm varies from four to five stresses per line, and

2 The legend of the whale is wide-spread throughout the animal-lore of Europe; the following passage sheds some light upon Birney's allusion:

Cethegrande is a fis, De moste ~ a t in water is;

Vt of his ~ote it smit an onde, ~e swetteste . ~ing ~at is o londe. ~er-fore o~re fisses to him dragen, Wan he it felen he aren fagen; He cumen and hoven in his mu~ , Of his swike he am uncu~ . Dis cete ~anne hise chaueles luke~ , Dise fisses alle in suke~ ; (Taken from Bruce Dickens and R. M. Wilson, eds. "The Bestiary", in Early Middle English Texts. Rev. ed.) Bowes and Bowes (London: 1956r l95L), p. 60, 11.57-58; 65-72. In the context of Birney's poem, those things given over to the wanderer in trust- his own life, goods, and children-are threatened by the monster, who lures the imprudent to him, sucks them in, and co~sumes them. 53.

there i:s a heavy reliance upon alliteration. Moreover~ the poem abounds with compound and archaic words; indeed~ the poem begins with the kenning "whalehall", one of the more traditional Anglo-

Saxon metaphors for the sea. By using an essentially concrete diction - "gull graced•', "face-charm" (1. 8), "flamefanged" (1. 7),

11 landtrace" - the poet is able to deal with a particularly abstract subject such as time in a manner that vividly depicts the all too real dangers that are so much a part of time and life.

The poem contains fourteen lines and bears some resemblance to the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. Though the conventional division of the sonnet into the octave and the sestet does not exist~ nor the formal rime, in content there is a change after line ten.

The last four lines clarify the analogy made in the first part of the poem by identifying the sea as time and present the dangers applicable to all men.

"Ulysses", the second poem mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, was written in 1946 and in it the memory of the war is very much present. Ulysses, the hero of old~ is paralleled by the modern man of arms. Both return home to a situation that is uneasy:

MAKE no mistake sailor~ the suitors are here~ and the clouds are not yet quiet. Peace, the bitchy Queen, is back, (none too willing~ and having to diet), but the girl of your heart has been knitting lonj. the boy-friends have arms, there may be a riot.

Unlike the return of Ulysses in The Odyssey, the home-coming of today's

3 Birn.ey, "Ulysses", The Strait of Anian~ p.79, 11.1-6. 54.

sailor has no epic poet's assurance that all will be well:

Go canny, of course, but don't go wrong, there's no guarantee of an epic ending. (11. 7-8)

Despite the unquiet peace and the clouds of war that linger still,

the soldier must continue to live, for mankind has been reprieved

once again:

Soldier, keep your eye on the suitors, have a talk with your son and the old hired man, but the bow is yours and you must bend it or you'll never finish what Homer began. (11.13-16)

These final lines underscore once again an aspect of Birney's humanism

that we have heretofore seen. Men inhabit an ambivalent world, one that

is both good and evil. Through his will man is able to bend the bow

to bring about peace and continue to live. As "World Conference" puts

it: " there is no fog but in the will" (Now is Time, p.56, 1.7); it is left to man to be the master of his fate, and consequently, the master of the fate of the world. The power for good is in man's will to good.

In the remainder of this section we shall discuss the poems

11 " From the Hazel Bough", "Winter Saturday , "Pacific Door" and " ••• Or

11 a Wind • The first two of these reveal the more superficial aspects of man's life, while the latter manifest the optimism that is an essential part of Birney's vision of man. "From the Hazel Bough" begins:

He met a lady on a lazy street hazel eyes and little plush feet4

4 Birney, "From the Hazel Bough", The Strait of Anian, p.l3, 11.1-4. 55.

Without preamble. this first stanza relates the central happening and introduces the rapid movement of the poem. The second stanza presents some rather light-hearted imagery and tells of watchers in the trees, while the third implies a secret love affair:

her legs swam by like lovely trout eyes were trees where boys leant out

hands in the dark and a river side round breasts rising with the finger's tide (11.5-12)

The next stanza consists of four similies, the last of which stresses the woman's superciliousness in contrast with her rotund appearance and gaiety:

she was plump as a finch and live as a salmon gay as silk and proud as a Brahmin (11.13-16)

The story of this brief encounter is brought to an end with:

they winked when they met and laughed when they parted never took time to be brokenhearted

but no man sees where the trout lie now or what leans out from the hazel bough (11.17-24)

The poem's main concern would appear to be the superficial relationship of the man and the woman; central to such an interpretation are the final eight lines cited above. Never taking time to be really involved 56. with one another, except in a physical way, the couple of the poem can experience no heartbreak or sorrow, which is likely in any meaningful relationship. Their association has come to nought and a potential occasion for love has not materialized.

Reinforcing the theme are the rhythm and imagery; the rapid metre sweeps each unpunctuated line forward into the movement of the succeeding line. The cumulative effect of the two-stressed lines is one of lightness and gaiety. Equally frivolous is the imagery employed by the poet to describe the lady. Her feet are "plush" and

"little"; her legs swim by "like lovely trout", and she herself is

"plump as a finch" and "live as a salmon". Birney finds in the quick metre of the abbreviated ballad stanza and the flighty imagery, the rhythmic and metaphoric correlatives for the shallowness of the bond that exists between the man and the woman. In the final stanza, with its negative implications the poet through understatement, another traditional ballad technique, suggests an unspecified sinister finality.

In a sense the simplicity of form of "From the Hazel Bough" belies the profounder implications of the poem's theme. As we have indicated in the previous chapter, man's communion with other men is of paramount importance in Earle Birney's poetry. Put in its simplest terms, this communion is nothing other than love. The poem just discussed tells of the failure of two people to love; thus, their relationship comes to nothing. Nevertheless, such inability to love is part of the total picture of man and must be considered along with the ~uccess of others to achieve communion. W.E. Fredeman is quite 57. correct when he writes that there is in Birney's themes "a recurring pattern of idealized optimism and hope~ fear, and idealized disillusionment and pessimism, ••• "s

Like "From the Hazel Bough", "Winter Saturday" depicts the more illusory and ephemeral nature of some of man's activities.

The vehicle for this theme is an extended metaphor which compares the people of the poem to moths. The poem begins:

FURRED from the farmhouse like catepillars from wood theyemerge, the storm blown out, and find in the Ford their cocoon.6

After the storm, they seek diversion and entertainment~ just as moths are attracted to light:

Through hardening duck and over the cold void impelled, they move to dreams of light and sound. Over drifts like headlands they go, drawn to the town's pink cloud, gliding unamazed through snow by the wind marbled and fluted. (11.5-11)

In their desire for the city lights, they overlook the natural beauty of their surroundings. The dancing and the movies prove to be a disappointment:

But lights fail, time is false, the town was less than its glow. (11.18-19)

The cycle is now completed and the human moths must retire from the light and return whence they came:

5 Fredeman, 10. 6 Birney, "Winter Saturday" , The Strait of Anian, p.l6, 11.1-4. 58.

Again in chrysails folded they must go lonely drowsy back through ghosts the wind starts from the waiting snow. (11.20-23)

In these concluding lines, the loneliness and emptiness of the

people is paralleled by the unreal presence of the ghosts created

by the wind and snow.

The beauty of this poem lies in its ability to sustain

quietly the metaphor mentioned at the beginning of this analysis.

Admirably suited to the dominant metaphor is the diction itself; witness the presence of "furred", "emerge", ''hatch", "trembling",

lf flutter", "impelled", and "glidingu. Such subtle half-rimes as

"farmhouse "-"out, "wood"-"cocoon", "sound"-11 cloud", contribute to the

hushed tone of the poem; even the line, "the town was less than its

glow" (1.19), which summarizes the disillusionment the town represents,

is admirably suppressed and understated; the meaning of the poem is

unobtrusively and non-didactically fused with the imagery, diction,

and rhyme. While he is a poet with a "message", he is seldom a poet of direct statement and dogmatism; indeed, if he has a fault as a poet

it is the fault of being, at times, too indirect and too succinet:

E.J. Pratt,. in a very favourable review of David and Other Poems, wrote

that some works are too condensed - a "cryptic virtue which may so easily pass into a mannerism. " 7

7 E.J. Pratt, rev. of David and Other Poems, Canadian Poetry Magazine, Vol. Vl, No.4 (March, 1943), 35. 59.

Before concluding this section, we have as yet two more

poems to deal with. The first of these is entitled "Pacific Door"

and the second, " ••• Or a Wind" . It is from a line of the former

that the volume takes its name and both poems can be viewed as

counter-balancing the rather pessimistic view of man manifested in

" From the Hazel Bough" and "Winter Saturday". Neither of the two

poems is naively optimistic, but both illustrate the poet's belief

in man's ability or potential to achieve communion and freedom.

" Pacific Door" begins with the ominous lines:

THROUGH or over the deathless feud of the cobra sea and the mongoose wind you must fare to reach us.B

We eventually infer that the pronoun "us" of the third line refers

either to the coastal regions of the Pacific coast of Canada or, more

probably, the people who inhabit them. As the poem proceeds, a list

of the great explorers, Drake, Cook, Bering, Vancouver, and anonymous

Spaniards, is presented. The reason for these h~storical references

is apparent: the physical dangers and hazards of the explorers become

the occasion for the poet's humanistic concern:

Here Spaniards and Vancouver's boatman scrawled the problem that is ours and yours, that there is no clear Strait of Anian to lead us easy back to Europe, that men are isled in ocean or in ice and only joined by long endeavour to be joined. (11.19-23)

The physical separation of men by the boundaries of geography and

nature is here symbolic of an even greater separation of the spirit

8 Birney, "Pacific Door", The Strait of Anian, p.37,11.1-3. 60.

the absence of whatever ideals and bonds make men one. While we have seen this theme before~ it is interesting to note its recurrence here in this form: the historical past is uaed for the presentation of

a humanistic truth, and anticipates to some degree the approach of

the verse of the last two voltunes which will be discussed later in this

thesis.

Line twenty-three of the passage cited above once again brings

Birney's emphasis upon the will of man into focus. The poem " ••• Or a

Wind" does much the same, but with an approach that is little seen in

the canon of his poetry. Here we see Birney in a Shelleyan manner assuming the role of prophet or seer. Man is identified with the wind:

Somehow, still, we may blow straight, come flowing into the couloir's caves, funnelling into the gullies, battering the bright rock with the hail of our will.9

The prophetic tone of the concluding lines, despite the tentative "may" , is strong and vigorous:

0 we may yet roar free, unwhirl, sweeping great waves into the deepening bores, bringing the ocean to boom and fountain and siren, tumbling the fearful clouds into a great sky wallowing, cracking the mountain apart- the great wind of humanity blowing free, blowing through, streaming over the future. (11.13-19)

In writing of Trial of a City, to be discussed shortly, R.E. Rashly makes a point that is equally valid for the lines just cited and, indeed, for most of Birney's poetry:

9Birney, " ••• or a Wind", The Strait of Anian, p.81, 11.9-12. 61.

II the future is whatever man makes it to be. Life is not fixed, then, in a pattern imposed on it from without, nor contained forever in the accomplishment. of the present ••• the lessons of the de­ pression and the wars have made it pos­ sible to see that what ic the._ futur~ becomes must implement the faiths of com­ mon love and social justice."lO

The poems discussed in this section, from "Mappemounde''

to " ••• Or a Wind", all reflect Birney's over-riding thematic pre-

occupation with man and the world that man has created, and the

world that man will create in the future. Hope and fear, optimism

and pessimism, are delicately balanced and weighed one against the

other; the factor determing what will prevail is man's volition.

Trail of a City further illustrates the poet's humanistic concerns

and provides us with a new genre and an interesting use of language;

it is to this new medium that we now turn.

11

As has been mentioned earlier, Trial of a City exposes the reader to two of the more salient aspects of Birney's poetry. On the one hand it continues the humanistic trend of the poems of the earlier volumes, while, on the other, it is illustrative of Birney's penchant for technical experimentation, for these reasons it has been singled out from the other poems of the volume in which it appears. We have previously seen the experimental aspect of the poet's work in such

10 R.E. Rashley, Poetry in Canada (Toronto, 1958), p.l43. 62. poems as "Anglo-Saxon Street", "War Winter" , and "Mappemounde" .

In the remainder of this chapter we shall attempt to account for

Birney's interest in the older verse form and to see this Anglo­

Saxon verse in the context of his poetry as a whole. It will be necessary, therefore, to look ahead to a number of examples from the succeeding volumes, Near False Creek Mouth and Ice Cod Bell or

Stone. To avoid duplication, however, the poems of these latter two volumes treated here will not be discussed when we come to examine the same volumes in the next chapter.

Trial of a City is a verse drama in which the city of

Vancouver is called upon to justify its existence at a public hearing.

The plaintiff is the Office of the Future, represented at the pro­ ceedings by Gabriel Powers, Q.C. The counsel for the city itself is

P.S. Legion. Presiding over the hearing is the ~nister of History of the Freed State of Columbia, who rules that only the dead are neutral, and, consequently, it is from their ranks that the witnesses must be drawn. (The court has the power to materialize and dematerialize them at will.) Captain George Vancouver, an Indian Chief, Dr. E.O. Seen

(a professor of geology, who, though not really dead, is considered such), Gassy Jack Deighton (an inhabitant of early Vancouver), and

Long Will of Langland are called upon to testify. The testimony given does not augur well for the city and it appears destined for destruction until the trial is interrupted by a living housewife. Mrs.

Anyone is permitted to testify off the record; she movingly asserts the joy and value of living in Vancouver. Half-way through her appeal, 63. the hearing is adjourned and judgement is reserved sine die. The city is saved and the play ends on a tentatively optimistic note.

Such is a skeleton outline of Trial of a City. The drama is a satire upon the materialism of modern life~ as epitomized in the city of Vancouver and the arguments Mr. Legion raises to defend it. It is only because of the positive assertion by the housewife~ of the joy of living that the city is allowed continued existence.

Much of the satire, and therefore much of the humour~ of the play come from the more improbable aspects of the work itself. The time

11 of the play~ for example~ is "five years later ; adding to the lud- icrousness of the situation is the stipulation that only the dead may testify. But perhaps the single greatest source of humour is the language of Gabriel Powers~ Q.C.~ £he counsel for the prosecution:

Treason or true~ the Office of the Future finds this city-pretty now a misfate in its planes. Like every think of booty~ sir~ it's copulated to destriction; its lifeliness decreases and must ever pass into nothingmist. Your town's dimnition is~ I fear~ both inevoidable and everdue.ll

Mr. Legion's objection to such doubletalk was ruled upon by the Minister of History as follows:

I'm afraid, Mr. Legion~ you'll have to cash Mr. Powers' words at par. Mr. Powers has been briefed by the Office of the Future and must use its language. It's not his fault if English changed again. (11.9-11)

Mr. Powers continually interjects such language and humour throughout the all-important testimony of the witnesses. At the end of Captain

11 Earle Birney~ Trial of a City, Trial of a City and Other Verse (Toronto, 1952), p.4, 11.14-20. Hereafter cited by page and line reference in the body of the text. 64. vancouver's remarks, he sees no need for cross examination, since

the Captain has said enough to damn Vancouver:

The Future then need ask the nimble Captaive nowhat; he cut and ran long since, and never planned nor reeks this beaching, never cares that we have come to bury Moby not appraise him. (p.lO, 11.29-32)

In this instance, Birney, through Powers, alludes to the funeral oration of Anthony and Moby Dick, just as in the lines cited earlier he alludes to Keats' "Endymion''. In other cases, the neologisms do not parody famous lines of literature, but they are still the source of much humour-as when two or more words are combined in verse or prose that is not as nonsensical as the defending attorney would have the court

11 believe. After questioning Professor E.O. Seen(''Eocene ), Mr. Powers states his point:

You hear. To blow this vain ~fancover skywards now is to advanquish by a jingle comic second what Adamizing Father Sun once planned. (p.25, 11.15-17)

We have seen earlier how Birney created neologisms on the Anglo-Saxon pattern. In Trial of a City he combines words to enrich the language of his poetry. Frequently too, the escape from a more conventional idiom provides a source of humour that could not be attained ordinarily. In the lines just cited, 11 Mancover11 (manhole-cover) suggests both Vancouver and humanity-man-being buried or covered; ''advanquish 11 contains the ideas of both ''advance11 and ''vanquish'', while "Adamizing" implies that the sun is both the source of or father of life and its destroyer (''A-damnizing" I

11 " Atomizing ). In a similar vein, Powers had previously objected to a 65. statement by the defense attorney with:

Objaculation, Mr. Minister! My wordy friend sleeks to mislead the captain into thinking-thanking bleak is white or grade disgrade, and every needive snug in his Prochristean bed. {p.9, 11.24-27)

Frequently the language of Trial of a City is presented in

Middle-English and Anglo-Saxon patterns. When Will of Langland testifies it is appropriately in a form very close to the Middle-

English verse of Piers Plowman:

I saw the Seven Sinners soaring from your airports, heading up in haste to overhaul the honest, to comb at will the prone land, the long comely nation, that n'er is long nor fair enough to end their lust for rifling. (p.35, 11.6-9)

At the end of his testimony, Will summarizes all he has said regarding the present state of Vancouver. In so doing he is the medium for the poet's belief in love and truth:

Nay, but lacking love, all this living's lifeless, love, too, of truth, and for our children's children, joy in giving joy, and gaining love by loving, lust of peace and fair thoughts, and loyalty to man. Though many walk fat and proud thy folk are sick with fear, taking the ·time's toys and trashing all the future, lunatic in laughter, lost in mere getting, and haunted by a skydoom their own hates have dealt ••• (p.40,11.9-16)

The testimony of the modern geologist, Professor E.O. Seen, is delivered in the alliterative four-stressed lines of Anglo-Saxon:

Since brown longheads leaped across Bering slid down these coasts spearing the salmon hardly two hundred centuries have hovered. Man, sir, this morning moved down to visit. (p. 24, 11. 20-23) 66.

Before the final scene in which the housewife enters, the prosecuting attorney has had the advantage. Ostensibly, there is no hope for Vancouver, since even the defense counsel, Mr. Legion, is himself the victim of the materialism of modern living. He does not lament the degradations imposed upon the Indian by the white man, nor is he fearful of the pollution, squalor, and vice that tend to accompany urbanization. All the witnesses, from Captian Vancouver to

Long Will of Langland, have, in varying degrees, testified that the city's redeeming features are few. Moreover, the language of Gabriel

Powers, the prosecutor, tends to confuse the all-too-logical and materialistic Mr. Legion.

When Mrs. Anyone enters upon the scene, it is with the voice of both practicality and emotion:

I woke today with my husband To the bronze clashing of peaks, To the long shout of the ocean, And the blood alive in my cheeks. Though the jetplanes drew their chalklines Over my blackboard sky The eraser sun undid them And a mastering hawk walked high. Two flickers knocked on a cedar's door Three finch ran fugues through the wind And the scent of primula moved in my world However my world had sinned. (p.42, 11.17-28)

Her defense of the city of Vancouver is not like that of Legion; in fact, she disclaims any relationship with him:

I am the cool Vancouver's kin, not yours And the fosterdaughter to that Headman mild; In the professor's logic I am woven, By the rank sailor's flesh my mind is cloven And I am yet the priestly plowman's child. For all mankind is matted so within me Desp~ir can find no earthroom tall to grow; 67.

Under the glittering comment of the planets Life asks, and I am made to give. (p.43, 11.7-13; 18-19)

Legion admires the rhetorical ability of the housewife and wants the tourist bureau to print copies of her speech. At this point,

Mrs. Anyone has the clerk de-materialize him after the fashion of the dead witnesses. The hearing is now adjourned and judgement post- poned. Finally, only Mrs. Anyone and Gabriel Powers remain. The dialogue that ensues reveals the housewife as a worthy opponent of the counsel for the Office of the Future. She adheres to the position that the future has no authority over her because:

The only future's what I make each hour. (p.46, 1.4)

The concluding section of their conversation, or, more aptly, their debate, affirms the housewife's belief in life:

POW-But Lady, lady, I threaten everthelease.

WOM-How could I know, without the threat of death, I lived?

POW-But do you know why you defy me?

WOM-That you might also be. Without my longer Will, my stubborn boon, You'd have no mate to check with but the cornered moon. It's my defiant fear keeps green my whirling world. (p.47, 11.4-10)

The language experimentation of Earle Birney in Trial of a City and the neologisms of the Anglo-Saxon verse have their precursors in the writings of such people as William Barnes and James Joyce. The former was primarily a linguist whose main concern was to rid the

English language of the influence of foreign tongues. He suggested 68. that Anglo-Saxon English was quite capable of being self-sufficient and offered numerous neologisms to replace the abstractions and unnecessary complexities of Latinized English. Willis D. Jacobs gives a list of some of the words that Barnes wished to substitute for the vocabulary already existing:

Ancestor. Fore-elder, kin-elder. Anniversary. Year-day. Anninilate. To fornaughten.

Conjnnction. Link-word. Correlative(words). Mate-words. Deciduous. Fallsome. Democracy. Folkdom.l2

While the neologisms of Barnes and Birney bear some resemblance to each other-both utilize concrete Anglo-Saxon forms-the purposes for which the new words are created are completely different. Barnes was a man whose life was devoted to his philologic and linguistic concerns.

His purpose, therefore, was more scientific than Birney's; he sought to purge and revitalize the English Language. While he did write a considerable amount of poetry, very little or none of it reflects his linguistic innovations.

Birney's purpose, on the other hand, is primarily to vary his poetic technique. There is no interest in reviving Anglo-Saxon or in creating neologisms on an Anglo-Saxon pattern per se. Seen within his work as a whole, "Anglo-Saxon Street", "War Winter", "Mappemounde" and the language of Gabriel Powers reflect the vigor that animates much of

12 william Barnes, "Speech-Craft" in \·lillis D. Jacobs' William Barnes: Linguist: University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, 1952), p.50. 69

Birney's poetry. It is because the poet experiments with different verse forms and language that his poetry strikes the reader as force- ful and diversified.

Birney's use of Anglo-Saxon and neologism is not, however, new, even within the area of literature itself. In Ulysses James Joyce had written:

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin! Full she dread that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins.l3

The alliteration and the archaic Middle-English diction resemble

Birney's own efforts along these same lines. In Finnegan's Wake

Joyce was to carry his experiments much farther than in Ulysses; by combining and re-combining the words and roots of English and other languages, he eventually arrived at a prose medium that was rich in its connotative and associative implications. One of Birney's more recent poems shows the possible influence of the later Joyce; that is, the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake. In Near False Creek Mouth, we find the poem "Orphiasco", the language of which is Joycean, even though its subject matter parodies that of Ivy Compton-Burnett:

Heil said the Ditchess entering without knottering then cratching a match on the sharp little theme-nail of her mind dizappeared

The stick remained silkily flaming rubbing a snatch of tawny lips together in a way that had always emblazoned the Duke

13 James Joyce, Ulysses (Mod. Lib. Ed.: New York, 1934), p. 379. YO

& would have again if his second fanger hadnt been exploring Joyce the first polarmaid so finglemindedly

he never twigged that her Grewce had meanwhile descended to Haides till he saw the kinked nack of the match lying cold 14 on his paved intensions

It is not implied that Birney's use of the pun and of neologism

is as sustained as that of Joyce. Of interest, however, is the

fact that Birney is in a tradition that embodies one of the dominant

concerns of the writers of this century. He, like many of his con-

temporaries, is concerned about finding a language for poetry that is vital and alive. Certainly Barnes and Joyce are at opposite ends of the language spectrum: the former sought to maintain English pure and undefiled, while the latter sought to enrich it through amalgamation.

But both men, one in the nineteenth and the other in the twentieth century, are modern examples of that interest in language which is still prevalent today.

Though _Birney, as a poet, takes no sustained interest in creat- ing a completely new language, he does not take the diction of his craft lightly. The dominant concern of his poems is man; the linguistic and other resources on which he draws in expressing his humanism are multitudinous and varied. Never content with one form or mode of ex- pression, he is constantly seeking new methods of presentation and it is this to a considerable degree, which gives his work the vigor mentioned above.

14 Birney, "Orphiasco", Near False Creek Mouth, p. 72. 71.

His later poems continue the variety that we have already seen, although here the affiliation is more perhaps with concrete poet~y-certainly with the typographical experiments associated with E.E. Cummings. We might do well to look at one of these later poems, "Njarit", as indicative of the eclectic quality of Birney's work. It begins:

From moonwastes of lava t t • St brighT t air W1 S down a mile ofb a r a n c a 15

Here the sense of the opening lines is paralleled structurally by the downward movement of the type itself. The motion soon becomes more horizontal and the emphasis is as much upon the colour of the landscape as the motion:

s. 1 lvering on

s pR aWls to solve the eq=ations of

buried s. and de and yram.d 1 1nk w Hv~ p s s

dULLing over the le a ky palme tto roofs (11.3-6)

Just as "barranca: in the opening lines visually depicts the steep

15Birney, "Njarit", Ice Cod Bell or Stone (Toronto, 1962), p.42, 11.1-2. 72.

side of a ravine~ so too is "Mesquite" typographically rendered in the form of a tree or grass, and "sprawls" is written as its meaning indicates. The same can be said of "eq=ations", "pyramids", and "sinks". The capitalized letters in "heavy" and ••dulling" serve to re-enforce onomatopaeically the logical sense of the diction by

11 stressing the dominant sound of each word ["HE V" and "ULL ]. The typography of the first half of the poem is undulating and rather free in form, thereby stressing the essentially unstructured nature of the vista. In the lines which we are about to examine, the type assumes a more rigid and sharply defined structure, in keeping with the pejorative opinion which the poet holds of the inroads of modern civilization:

Only around the asTOUNdinG ochre/and/ash 1 white of the a/esuohoohcsyra b o r so ute yc lfempo 1 1

and the bLACk fii of the coffeewarehouse

and the (blank) tyrot~a obaccof

is the air brigh~ again and haRRRD

and 1 u U U n a tttt T ttttttttt tic (11.7-12)

Upon deciphering the more difficult form of the type in these lines,

1 we find that the "absolutely contemporary schoolhouse ' ~ the "cube of the coffeewarehouse", and the "tobacco factory'', all share the rigid and unimaginative lines of the worst in contemporary architecture.

Capitalization and repetition in 1 'bright", "hard" and "lunatic" indicate that in these concluding lines the poet is also concerned with an 73. auditory harshness to accompany the visual sterility.

"Njarit" can be seen~ thematically as continuing the humanism of the early poems and Trial of a City. It also anti­ cipates the concern with which Birney views the confrontation of modern society and a culture such as that of Mexico's. The city of Vancouver in Trial represents all that is wrong with contemporary man~ in essence~ it is to be associated with the schoolhouse and the tobacco factory of the Mexican town in "Njarit". Like the Anglo­

Saxon verse~ Trial of a City and "Njarit" manifest Earle Birney's interest in the rhythn and structure of language and poetry; though his poems impel us to take into account his relationship to such men as William Ba~es and James Joyce, in the area of poetic technique he is no man's disciple and his originality may lie in the fact that he is a poet of many traditions and great variety. Chapter V

Ice Cod Be~l or Stone and

Near Fa~se Creek Mouth 75.

The most obvious feature of the two last volumes of

Birney's poetry, which will be treated in this chapter, is the foreign orientation of the poems. Both Ice Cod Bell or Stone

(1962) and Near False Creek Mouth (1964) contain a large number of poems whose setting and background may be somewhat alien to the

North American reader. Nevertheless a consideration of the poetry in itself is possible and, as has been stated earlier, is one of the primary concerns of this thesis.

A study of these foreign poems reveals the poet's sustained interest in men and mankind; to this extent, these poems do not appear as departures from those of the earlier volumes, but rather as further specific manifestations of the poet's concern with men everywhere. The experience is no less universal merely because the setting is localized. Many of the poems are written from the point of view of the poet as outsider, as tourist, so that the poem itself is more amenable to our North American sensibilities insofar as we ourselves share the same aesthetic and cultural background as the poet. The description of and commentary on the human condition in different countries reveals the similarity of all men everywhere, who must struggle to survive and to preserve their human dignity.

Like much of the poetry hitherto discussed, the poems of

Ice Cod Bell or Stone and Near False Creek Mouth may be classified as works of social comment. It is necessary, however, to reiterate 76. a point that has been made previously; the poems as individual statements are best viewed in the perspective of the ambiguous or dual nature of man himself. The poet's immediate concern is with particular men who are born, endure the hardships of life and possess its joys, and then die. There are no doctrinaire solutions to the problem; men have created the injustices present in the world and they can be resolved chiefly by man's will to love and respect his fellow men. Individual men may fail and others may succeed, but at least men must be aware of what is wrong and attempt to put things right.

The two volumes of poetry to be considered here are best treated separately since the poems of Near False Creek Mouth have an organization inherent in the volume itself. Of the poems in Ice Cod Bell or Stone, twelve have their setting in Mexico, five in Asia, and various others in such widely separated areas as Honolulu and Ellesmereland. Certain poems such as "Captain

Cook", "El Greco: Espolito", "Vitus Bering", and "Can.Lit.", further illustrate that the later poetic interests of Earle

Birney are associated more directly with man than with man and nature. There is less concern with the confrontation of man and nature and more concern with man himself in society in a time of peace.

Probably the most direct commentary on the social injustice and oppression that some men are forced to endure is the poem 77.

entitled "The Travelling Workers Curse", in the volume Ice Cod

Bell or Stone. In the poem a group of migrants are forcibly driven from the property of a wealthy landowner in whose brook

they wish to bathe:

He says it With clubs, this landowner's toady, "Back from that brook, no trespassing here! On your way, prowlers, yes you, all five, This ain't no bathtub for you bastards! This stream's clean, not for bums to dive in."1

The colloquial and forceful language of the guardian is answered

in kind by the offended workers:

At night give him only this running Stream for blanket, for fleas frogs afloat, So many his own darling daughter Sits picking them from her petticoats. May a dredger tear through his sleeping, Wake him greenish as pool-scum, and wet, Then wash him away with his creek-trolls, Away in the swash of his own sweat! "

( p 0 2 7 ' 11 0 3 3 -4 0)

The curse itself, of which the above lines are the culmination, is notable for its spontaneity and concreteness. There is no extended tirade against the system of landholding as such, but rather a very natural response to a provoking situation. The denial of a swim in the brook gives rise to a series of pronouncements against the boss, couched in terms relating to the brook on his property:

The thatch over his head be water And liquid planks under foot for his health. (11.23-24)

1 Earle Birney, "The Travelling Workers' Curse", Trans. "from the Hungarian of Attila Jozsef" by Ilona Duczynska, Ice Cod Bell or Stone (Toronto,1962),p.26, 11.11-16. 78.

Let them be frothy seas he must smoothe With his fancy iron-toothed harrow. Let them be ~ank stalks of rain he grows, Reaps, stacks, he and his boy-farrow. (11.25-28)

Undoubtedly the effectiveness of some of the curse is lost due to the fact that the poem is Englished from the Hungarian.

For example, the ~ines

For boots Let him pu~l on the holes in the dike. (11.31-32) are somewhat a~ien to our sensibi~ities and imagination. However, the extremely vivid and apt descrption of the guard would appear to lose very little in the translation:

Bel~owing strides the brook's watchman, Hero of creeks, bullfrog's bullyboy, Apprentice water-troll. (11.9-11)

The lines contain just the right amount of ironic exaggeration

("Hero of creeks") and deflation ("Apprentice water-troll") to enable us to appreciate the feelings of the workingmen toward the boss's hireling.

Quite a different poem is the second of two works by

Mao-tse-Tung which the poet put into poetic form from translat- ions by Ping-ti Ho. "Snowscape from a Plane" possesses the same direct conversational tone as "The Travelling Workers' Curse", but the language itself is that of a man whose sensibilities differ from those of the workers: 79.

How northern clean is this vision! Below, a thousand miles are sealed with ice, ten thousand around us are whirling with snow. Look, from the Long Wall's either fl~nk only a vast wildering stretches now;

The lines here cited contain a vigor not unlike that of the former poem, though the tone is more descriptive than vituperative. If anything, the first half of "Snowscape" is more poetic, in the sense that the poetic is frequently associated with what is visionary. Particularly striking are the lines:

Silver serpents are dancing on the mountains, wax elephants prance over the high plains, and we would measure our own soaring with the skyloft. (11.8-10)

In the snow being blown by the wind, the poet conjures up snakes and elephants; the narration from the vantage point of a plane enables him to see better the beauties around and below him and to reflect upon the perfectibility and aspirations of men, who all too often impose needless limitations upon their ability to attain their goals.

In the second section of the poem, the heroes of the past are seen to have their limitations, despite their greatness. The emphasis is upon the present and the possibility of an even greater personage and leader emerging:

2Birney, "Snowscape from a Plane", Trans. from the Chinese of Mao Tse Tung by Ping-ti Ho, Ice Cod Bell or Stone, p.31, 11.1-5. 80.

and even he who was Heaven's proud son throughout a generation, Jenghiz Khan, could bend his bow only to bring down a gyrfalcon. These have all gone. But in assessing the glamorous ones wait - let us see who rises this morning. (11.21-26)

What seems to emerge from the poem is the belief on the part of the

poet, Mao, that evaluations of great people in the past can never

be absolutely conclusive, for the past is viewed in a different

perspective with each new day. The "glamorous ones" of the past must

be viewed in the light of the present and the great men of today.

Birney finds in Mao's poem a view of man that is consonant with his

own emphasis upon the will of man to improve upon the past and create

a better world.

A somewhat more sardonic view of history, particularly Canadian

literary history, is presented in the poem "Can.Lit.":

Since we had always sky about, when we had eagles they flew out leaving no shadow "Digger than wren's to trouble our most aeromantic hens. Too busy bridging loneliness to be alone we hacked in ties what Emily etChed in bone. We French, we English, never lost our civil w_ar, endure it still, a bloodless civil bore; no wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted. It's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted.3

The poem owes its vigor to the terse compact phrasing and the rather

trenchant humour. In the opening four lines it is stated that there was always the subject matter for poetry, but the poets - ironically

3Birney, "Can. Lit.", Ice Cod Bell or Stone, p.18. 81.

called "eagles" in fact produced little or nothing of great merit; the hens who long to fly but cannot are the critics or aspiring poets who have only a mediocre literature to criticize or emulate. In lines five and six the phrase "Too busy bridging loneliness to be alone" stresses the physical isolation of

Canadians from one another; the means taken to overcome the loneliness, specifically works of literature, partook of the burly nature of hewing ·wood rather than the more finely crafted and durable accomplishments of one such as Emily Dickinson. The last two couplets of the poem contrast the American civil war with the bloodless and lacklustre hostilities of the two major ethnic groups in Canada. It is implied that because there was no such decisive action as that in the United States, then there was no need - nor indeed the possibility - of a Canadian equivalent of Walt Whitman.

It is only by a dearth of ghosts that Canadians are paradoxically haunted.

The poet feels the emptiness resulting from a lack of cultural history and heritage. In a semi-serious, satirical mood, he views man's present as being affected, in this case detrimentally, by his past or rather his lack of one. This alienation is characteristic of a number of contemporary poets, but particularly of a poet writing from the background of a country that is still searching for its national identity. Whether or not this lack of a 82. sense of identity with the past accounts for Birney's turning to foreign cultures and milieux is a moot point, but the fact of his doing so cannot be denied. It is to the poems in which he does this, especially the poems of Mexico, that I should now like to turn.

The first of these is a descriptive poem entitled "State of Sonora". The overall impression that the reader gets of the country~side is that of a sun-baked, harsh land in which life is difficult:

By noon sun cakes and over the river's skeleton trucks flash and rattle under a glassy sky. Life crusts, a shell, on the surface or, like scale, flakes. Around bhe prickly pear to the tarmac boys skip like chestnuts, naked, or stricken wither to death across adobe sills.4

In the above lines the use of such words as "skeleton", "rattle",

"crusts", "shell", and "flakes" portrays the bare sparse nature of the land. When human life is introduced in the person of the boys, it is "naked", "stricken", and withering. The unusual simile which compares the boys to chestnuts captures the brittleness of the ground upon which they are playing; heat and the barrenness of Sonora are associated with either a meagre existence or death. The life of

4Birney,"State of Sonora", Ice Cod Bell or Stone,p.40, 11.7-17. 83. the shepherds and goatherds is as harsh as the land in which they

live:

men pad weeklong after lean sheep and flinteyed goats through crack of thin dust between the joints of cactus- armoured land. (11.23-27)

Relief, if it may be termed such, only comes occasionally:

Then in a Sunday of brassbands and firecrackers dance on slaphappy huaraches through cobbled plazas till they drop down drunk to sleep on the radiant highway with scrannel chickens and bony cows. (11.28-34)

The men who eke out an existence on the land are paralleled by those who make their living at sea. The heat of the land is not escaped and their condition as men has the same aura of timeless futility that pervades the life of all those who suffer under the relentless sun:

the fishermen turn backs gnarled as turtles on the day sizzling into the sea of Cortez and point home for the lights diamonding in chalky huts on the timeless cliffs, their stark boats slapping over the flattening rollers that smack and are bounced back by the guano-glazed islands. (p.41, 11.46-54)

The sun which is so necessary for life is also the source of the dryness and oppressive heat that afflict the land and its peoples. 84.

As we have already indicated, the diction of the poem is so chosen as to stress the hardness and crusting of the earth and the local inhabitants. Structurally, the time sequence of the poem is dependent upon the sun, for what the poem presents is a day like so many others for the people of the State of Sonora. At the beginning of the poem, the early morning rains are described:

Thin country with the bright hard hide. Rain richochets from adamantine ranges, where wild peccaries scrabble, and clatters intact down baked ravines with morning shard of culverts and swart hill pine back to the sea. (11.1-7)

The life-giving rain is unable to penetrate the soil, runs off, and is wasted. Following the introductory lines is a description of the effect of the sun at noon (already cited in 11.7-17) and the last section of the poem presents the fishermen at dusk returning home from their labours (11.46-54). The scorching sun and the morning to dusk routine of each day make one twenty-four hour span much like another; consequently, life seems to be caught up in a futile timeless cycle, divorced from variety and purpose.

Such a realistic portrayal of life in Mexico would indicate that Birney is aware of the less glamorous aspects of man's life in foreign lands. In other words, his awareness is not that of the tourist who sees only the exotic nature of the countries that he 85 0

visits. One poem in particular, entitled "Sinaloa", shows the reaction of a local native to the na1vete of a tourist:

Si, senor, is halligators here, your guidebook say it, si, jaguar in the montanas, maybe helephants, quien sabe? You like, those palm trees in the sunset? Certamenti very nice, it happen each night in the guide tourista. But who the hell eat jaguar, halligator, you heat them? Mira my fren, wat this town need is muy big breakwater-- I like take hax to them jeezly palmas. 5

The vigor and humor of the poem is sustained throughout by the broken

English-cum-Spanish of the native. The poem consists of five stanzas, each of which continues in the same vein as the first ; what is beautiful and novel to one man is a source of poverty to the other:

Hokay, you like bougambilla, ow you say, flower-hung cliffs? Is how old, the Fort? Is Colhuan, muy viejo, before Moses, no? Is for you, senor, take em away, send us helevator for weat. (11.15-17)

The speaker wants bulldozers not machetes, drains not picturesque swamps, tractors rather than oxcarts, and the music of refrigerator trucks in place of that of the birds. Each of the stanzas concludes with a particularly forceful outburst against the more "beautiful" aspects of his country; a sampling shows the following:

and shoot all them anaquista egrets. (1.14)

and bugger the pink flamingos.

( 1 0 21)

and chingar those cute little burrows. (1.28)

5 Birney, "Sinaloa", Ice Cod Bell or Stone, p.42, 11. 1-7. 86.

In the final lines the tourist is given a further candid opinion of the impression of the country that his manual, the tourist guide book, gives:

Sin argumento, my fren, is a beautiful music, all them birds. Pero, wy you no like to hear combos, refrigerator trucks ? Is wonderful on straight new ighway, jampack with melons, peppers, bananas, tomatoes, si, si, ••. Chirrimoyas" Mangos" You like! Is for Indios, solamente, is bruise, no can ship, is no bueno, believe me, senor-- and defecar on those goddam guidebook. (11.29-35)

In addition to the colloquial, Spanish-fLavoured diction and the humor . of the poem, two other aspects of it are worthy of note. The poem has much in common with the dramatic monologue; throughout all five stanzas of the poem, the remarks of the local speaker are made in response to questions and comments by the tourist, although we must infer the foreigner's half of the conversation.

By means of the monologue we come to appreciate the life and character of one who must exist amidst the dubious beauties of a materially poor area. A second technique the poem employs is that of deflation: the Mexican agrees only to disagree (see 11.1-5; 15-17;

29-31). This helps to convey the tourist's half of the conversation, but it is also a source of humor in the poem as the spontaneity and vigor of the derogatory remarks derive from the quickness of the retorts that are made.

From both "State of Sonora" and "Sinaloa" it is evident that the poet is aware of the harsh realities of life among the poorer 87. people of Mexico. That they are also the beneficiaries of a rich historical and cultural heritage is an aspect of their civilization that cannot be overlooked. Much of what they have been bequeathed, however, has been prostituted and put to material use; the first section of "Conducted Ritual: San Juan de Ulua" reads:

Wholehearted Aztecs used this isle for carving out the cores of virgins. Cortes, more histrionic, purified it with a fort and modernized the Indians in dungeons contrived to flood each time the tide was high. Later the pirates, internationally impartial, fired it, baking both sides, and later yet both Mexicans and Yanquis had a turn (killed by shells in eighteen-forty seven: soldiers ninety, civilians two-eleven~6

The killings of the past partake of the nature of a ritual; the Aztecs,

Cortes, pirates, Mexicans, and Americans have all contributed to the bloody history of the island. In the second part of the poem, the sacrifices are continued as the tourists and their guides defile the ground which has seen the shedding of so much blood:

And still it lies an isle of sacrifice. Eyes conquistadorial and burning above their Aztec noses, acolytes with skullandcrossbone armbands from the Officina de Tourista suffer the willing files to come before the neverfailing mysteries, and hold the virgin hearts aloft where bled to death lies history. (11.12-20)

Seen from the point of view of the poet, the material poverty of the

6 Birney,"Conducted Ritual: San Juan de Ulua", Ice Cod Bell or Stone , p • 53 , 11. 1-11 • 88.

land and the consequent degradation of men are to be deplored.

Equally to be detested, however, is the sacrifice of local history and tradition in the name of progress, modernization, or material advancement, as shown, for example, in the poem "Ajijic".

This hip gringo cant wait to tell you it rhymes with tee-HEE. He'll have another tequila, muchas gracias,make it anejo;

From under the bar he lugs out to be seen his six feet of representational nonart. It's already sold, to the patron, who has a heart of sorts, also his brushes, camera, and IOUs. 7

The poem continues with an even more explicit statement of the

inroads of a foreign culture:

Outside the fishermen will pass and the blobs of pescada blanca in the nets swaying over their shoulders will flake their bare flanks with mica as they trudge from the retreating but as yet purely Mexican lake. (11.21-26)

This hatred of the prostitution of native history and culture

is one of the more salient aspects of Birney's humanism as it is reflected in these later poems. In a poem entitled "Irapuato", the poet continues the bloody history of Mexico mentioned above in connection with "Conducted Ritual:"; he writes:

this is a favourite nook for massacre Toltex by Mixtex Mixtex by Aztex Aztex by Spanishtex Spanishtex by

7 Birney, "Ajijic", Ice Cod Bell or Stone,p.44, 11.1-4; 10-13. 89.

Mexitex by Mexitex by Mexitex by Texaco

So any farmer can see how the strawberries are the biggest and reddest in the whole damn continent

but why when arranged under the market flies

do they look like small clotting hearts?8

Implied throughout the bulk of these poems is the inherent value of the past, especially a past that has been steeped in human blood and tradition:

From the stone music of their past the only isthmus, from astronomic shrines fantastic as iguanas, to this unlikely world (3 bil.) that waits its earthquake, is their long matriarchal ritual of women whose eyes from fires more stubborn than under hotsprings flash out a thousand Mayan years before a Diaz. 9

Culture and tradition can be altered for the better, however, even though the change is not continued for very long.

In the area of the arts, for example, Francisco Tresguerras attempted to introduce "neo-classical form into the churches of his town, in opposition to the elaborate rococo style prevailing before 10 (and after) ".

8 Birney, "Irapuato", Ice Cod Bell or Stone, p.46, 11.4-15

9 Birney, "Sestina for Tehauntepec"; Ice Cod ·Bell or ·stone, p.54, 11.19-24.

lO Birney, author's note to "Francisco Tresguerras", Ice Cod Bell or Stone, p .51. 90.

What is said in the poem itself is applicable generally to the deformation of worthwhile traditions and aspects of history that, in the poet's view, should be preserved:

They have hung up once more all the clutter you banished; misshapen pieties pockmark the sheerness; mock-blood of a god _ drips from your dome.11

In a particularly fine poem, "Pachucan Miners", there is an interesting blending of two widely separated cultures. Here the poet applies the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to Mexican silver miners.

The poem's beginning evokes an aura of sacredness and ritual:

All day in a night of lurch, blast, bend, they have deepened the dark search their precortesian priests began into the cold peak's argent mysteries.12

The diction employed-"dark search", "precortesian priests", and

"mysteries" - suggests an historical continuity with the ritual of the past in that the activity of the miners parallels the rites of their ancestors. Continuing the comparison is the remainder of the first

section of the poem in which the ore is brought to the surface and

11 Birney, "Francisco Tresguerras", p.50, 11.22-27

12 Birney, "Pachucan Miners", Ice Cod Bell or Stone, p.47, 11.1-5. 91.

taken "to sorceries beyond their vision" (1.8); when the workers themselves ascend at night, they are "orphic and helmeted as divers"

(1.11). By the light of the stars, the miners ritually wash them- selves of the accrued dirt of their labours and turn homeward:

Under thin stars by murky troughs white-eyed they spit, wash rockscurf off, turn without rancour from the guarded gate below the white Olympus of the gringos. (11.13-16)

Yet like a defeated army still descend past blackened walls above the tree-abandoned valley till at the lowest street the doors of light

peal out, tequila is a brightness in the throat, bottles and faces gleam, receive them in a sensible dream. (11.21-27)

Freed from their hard work, the men find relaxation in the cantina, though the "sensible dream" is only a temporary interruption of their daily ritual in the silver mines; they must soon return to the underworld in which they spend a large part of their lives:

then step their own way down to where deep in her torchy den, snakes Toltecan looping in her ears, her crucifix agleam above the sheets, Eurydice reclines and hears the wild guitars, and daily waits the nightly rescue of her silver men. (pp.47-48, 11.32-38)

In these final lines the use of ritual and myth reaches its culmination in the image of a Toltecan Eurydice awaiting the return 92.

of her lovers. It is interesting to note that in addition to the

use of both Greek and Mexican history, the crucifix of Christianity

is introduced. These different cultural and historical elements work together to create an impression of remoteness; the men seem cut

off from the realities of the present and belong to the timeless world of ritual and myth. The silver miners are almost non-human

as they work and descend from the mountain. It is only during the brief period at the cantina that they assume the features of men:

In the cantinas helmets roll, backs fling upright, 0 now legs are male, are braced, each knotty pair, to hold up song and hurl it at the night. (11.28-31)

Previously they had been without "rancour", "wordless", and "like

a defeated army". There is no escape from this world, for it is only

in the world of Eurydice that they are able to work and to continue

their existence. Paradoxically they must undergo the dehumanization

of their affair with her - their work demands it - if they are to

continue to survive as men. The "Pachucan Miners" are part of the mosaic of humanity, albeit a suffering one, with which Birney the humanist is concerned. Their work is difficult and, like the men

in "State of Sonora", they provide us with a glimpse of life in

Mexico today.

In the volume entitled Near False Creek Mouth,Birney

employs a geographical organization to present his concern for men. 93.

The initial poem, "November Walk Near False Creek Mouth", has its setting in Vancouver, but as the poet states, "its theme is our precarious universe". 13 The poems that follow it manifest in varying degrees the precariousness of man's life in today's world; they appear under the following headings: "Caribbean

Turnabout", "Farthest Neighbours", "Beyond False Creek Mouth", and "Near False Creek Mouth". Interspersed throughout the volume are four maps, each of which shows the geographical location of the poems that follow in relationship to False Creek itself. It is interesting to note that the last map appears under the heading o£ "Near False Creek Mouth", but it includes, in a less detailed fashion, all of the other maps. The effect obtained is a visual illustration of the closeness of men everywhere; as the poet himself wrote in a passage cited earlier:

"they are all close to us now, not only in time space, but in 14 the sharing of needs and hopes--and premonitions of disaster."

In the first poem, "November Walk Near False Creek Mouth", the poet views various scenes as he walks along the beach near his home. These scenes give rise to thoughts of the troubled world and the men and women who inhabit it. The highly personal

13 Birney, author's note, Near False Creek Mouth.

14 Ibid. 94. text of his encounters is briefly interrupted by shorter sections that place the poet and what he sees - the world of man - in a cosmic perspective. The poem begins with one of these briefer sections:

The time is the last of warmth and the fading of brightness before the final flash and the night15

Immediately the poem stresses the time factor indicated in the title. The season is late autumn and eventually we learn too that the approximate time of the poem is before and during sunset. When the narrator does speak~ it is of men in the autumn of their humanity:

I walk as the earth turns from its burning father here on the lowest edge of mortal city where windows flare on faded flats and the barren end of the ancient English who tippled mead in Alfred's hall and took tiffin in lost Lahore drink now their fouroclock chainstore tea sighing like old pines as the wind turns (11.4-12)

The "barren end of the ancient English" is reenforced with:

The theme lies in the layers made and unmade by the nudging lurching spiralling down from nothing

down through the common explosion of time through the chaos of suns to the high seas of the spinning air where the shelves form and re-form down through cirrus to clouds on cracking peaks to the terraced woods and the shapeless town and its dying shapers (p .3~ 11.33-42)

15 Birney~ "November Walk Near False Creek Mouth"~ Near False Creek Mouth~ p.2~ 11.1-3. (Poem# 1) 95.

Here, as in much of Birney's earlier poetry, that which is associated with the city is sterile and valueless. Lines

33-35 present a rather nebulous statement of the theme; the poem appears to be organized on a visual scale of cosmic proportions, descending from the timeless reaches of space to the air above the earth, the world of man himself, and the sea. The sea in turn is presented as an ocean of air,dark and unfathomable. The nothingness of space is parallelled by the nothingness of the lives of so many of the earth's inhabitants.

After describing some of the visitors to the beach, the poet writes:

I pass

dreaming my own unravelled plots between eating water and eaten shore in this hour of the tired and homing retired dissolving in the days of the separate wait for the mass dying (p.4, 11.84-90)

Nothingness, in human terms, is defined as loneliness--men isolated from one another, possessing only their expectation of death. As a man, the poet feels this loneliness:

and I having clambered down to the last shelf of the gasping world of lungs do not know why I too wait and stare before descending the final step into the clouds of the sea (p.5, 11.91-95) 96.

Man is seen as living between the timelessness of space and the

near-immortality of the ocean:

The beat beating is the soft cheek nudging of the sly shoving almost immortal ocean at work on the earth's liquidation (11.96-99)

To the imagination of the poet, the world will end in a

flash of light, to be followed by darkness; this has already been stated in the opening lines of the poem. At one stage, the sun,

sea, and ·humanity are fused in an image that captures the picture

of man as waiting for the end:

Outward the sun explodes light like the brief rehearsal of light to come over the vitreous waters At this edge of the blast a young girl sits on a granite bench so still as if already only silhouette burned in the stone (11.100-106)

In order to underline this image there follows the text of a rather dull conversation between two women gossiping and a vivid picture of the

freakish forms of tugs all bows and swollen funnels straining to harbour in False Creek and blindly followed by mute scows with islets of gravel to thicken the city and square bowls of saffron sawdust the ground meal of the manstruck forest or towing shining grids of the trees stricken (11.117-124)

The reference to the tugs and the sea effects an easy transition 97.

to a description of ~ife in the ocean. Here the physica~ movement is one of ascent whereas former~y it was one of descent:

The beat is the slap slip nudging as the ledges are made unmade by the lurching swaying of all the world that lies under the ·spinning air

from the dead centre and the fiery circles up through the ooze to b~ack liquidities up to the vast moats where the doomed whales are swimming by the weedy walls of sunless Carcassonnes rising rising to the great ee~s waiting in salt embrasures and swirling up to the twilit roofs that floor the Gulf up to the crab-scratched sands of the dappled Banks

into the sunblazed living mud and the radiant mussels that armour the rocks (p.6, 11.132-148)

Just as the movement of space and air had descended upon the world of man, so, too, the beat of the ocean - the product of unfathomable depths - converges upon him. But man must remain in the barren wor~d he has created, a world

where carhorns call call in the clotting air by a shore where shamans never again will sound with moon-snail conch the ritual plea to brother salmon or vanished seal and none ever heard the horn of Triton or merman (11.152-158)

As night falls, the beat quickens and a sense of urgency prevails; the poet, having described the distasteful refuse of man's 98. labour, feels the need to return once more to the seawall, to be as close as he can to the sea:

as I too turn with the need to feel once more the yielding of moist sand and thread the rocks back to the seawall shadowed and empty now of booklost ladies or flickering wrens (p.8, 11.204-208)

He continues from the seawall along the shore, describing an old

Swede eyeing some girls, and sea crashing into the shore, and the wreck of an old boat

longdrowned on an Ararat of broken clamshells and the flaking of dead crabs (p.9, 11.222-224)

The sight of beachlogs gives rise to

heigh ho the logs that no one wants and the men that sit on the logs that no one wants ( 11. 229-231)

Finally he can go no farther and turns away from the shore's edge and must face "the human encrusted reefs" (p.10, 1.258) and "the world of the dry troubling" (p. 9, 1.247). His thoughts revert once more to the endless reaches of space and the conclusion of the poem echoes the beginning:

But still on the highest shelf of ever washed by the curve of timeless returnings lies the unreached unreachable nothing whose winds wash down to the human shores and slip shoving

into each thought nudging by footsteps now as I turn to my brief night's ledge 99.

in the last of warmth and the fading of brightness on the sliding edge of the beating sea (p.10, 11.269-278)

"November Walk Near False Creek Mouth", like an earlier poem,

"Dusk on English Bay", used the immediate scene before the poet to effect a transcendent vision of man. The difference between the two poems lies in the scope of the vision; "Dusk" utilized a peaceful scene to attain a picture of men and war whereas "November Walk" uses a less than flattering picture of man and the world he has created to achieve a prospect of the cosmos and the place of man in the universe. It would be unwise to attempt too definite a statement of the theme of a poem such as "November Walk", for the poet at one point speaks of what he writes as follows:

lone as my half-thoughts wheeling too with persistence of hunger or floating on scraps of flotsam (p.7, 11.180-183)

In the half-thoughts we are given a picture of man confronted with the vastness of space and ocean; he has created nothingness in his own life and now must live with the consequent loneliness. Always his life is swept over by the winds that spiral down from the emptiness of space and his "darkening bitten shore" (p.lO, 1.255) is eroded continually by the depths of the ocean.

The vastness of the scale of "November Walk Near False Creek

Mouth" acts as a preparation for the framework of the poems in the 100. rest of the volume. Always the geographic focal point is False Creek; no matter where the locale of any one poem~ the concerns of the people involved are close to us all, insofar as we share their "needs and 16 hopes--and premonitions of disaster."

In a poem entitled "Transistor"~ the poet describes the actions of an old negro woman in Jamaica as she sweeps a seldom-used guest-house for the visitors. These include the poet, an engineer, and two young lovers. The woman has a rich heritage that intrigues the poet:

But the old woman was belting songs out as if she had to send them all the way back to the sea and the canebrakes her greatgrandfather ran from the night he brought her words stored in his rebellious head beyond the howl of the slavers' hounds to this remotest hilltop in Jamaica 17

The young negro couple, listening to a transistor radio, are a completely different breed from the housekeeper, who has never seen a transistor. The world of the poet and the world of the new generat- ion of negroes is the same; but though the latter pay no attention to the old lady and retire to the porch, the poet continues to hear in her singing the history and cultural depth of her race:

16 Birney, author's note

17 Birney, "Transistor", Near False Creek Mouth, p.12, 11. 19-26. (Poem # 2) 101.

as her mind unravelled to airs a grandmother might have woven stooping in dappled coffee groves when this was a plantation house buzzing with brief Whiteman's prospering (p.13, 11.48-52)

as if her voice were immortal and separate within her and she only the toughened reed vibrated still by the singing dead by the slaved and the half-free The narrow high-ceilinged room was a box and deaths for fear of Mamba hope of Jesus the bitter years and the bawdy (pp.13-14, 11.57-64)

Her song ended, the negress toasts the health of the men of the poet's nation and leaves. It is only now that the poet becomes aware of the sound of the transistor; the radio station is playing a cowboy song "from last year's Parade" (p.14, 1.88). The young couple on the porch have been listening:

I suppose they'd been listening to him as exclusively as I to her and out of just as much need to exchange our pasts (p.15, 11.91-94)

"Transistor", the first poem from the section entitled

'Caribbean Turnabout', is of interest because it presents an attitude that is of special importance in this last volume of poems. The back- ground of the local people, despite their lack of material progress, is valued because it represents something that is missing in the poet's heritage. Seen in its simplest terms, it is possible that the poet's interest in the past of the housekeeper could be the result of a tourist's curiosity for what is novel or unknown. Beyond this, however, 102. for the poet the songs of the old woman revive the past in a fashion that the songs of the cowboy cannot do. She is a living transistor~ both the product and conveyor of her past.

The poet is aware of the fact that he is alien to the culture of the people of the islands, but he is appreciative of any acceptance that he finds:

Always now I move grateful to all of you who let me walk thoughtless and unchallenged in the gardens in the castles . 18 o f your s k1ns

In a similar vein, he writes of the island of Jamaica itself:

The other velvetskinned graceful as a dark gladiolus served saltfish and akee to us three:

two pink young Montreal boyfriends one greywhite Vancouver me

The cod was from Newfoundland thel said The new found land is here I said 9

Certain parts of these foreign lands, however, contain much that is odious to the poet. In a poem entitled "Caracas", he describes some of the ills concomitant with newly found material prosperity:

18 Birney, "For George Lamming", Near False Creek Mouth, p.16, 11.24-31. (Poem #3)

l9 Birney, "Saltfish and akee", Near False Creek Mouth, p.17, 11.17-23. (Poem #4) 103.

Pumped up from the immigrant ships by the great nose of the American-aid Hiway labourers from marginal bogs in Galicia lengthen the 9-mile ooze of slums (2 walls of packingbox 2 of air ~ a scraptin roof) from which fountain 89 skyscrapers 20

The National Pantheon, containing the bones of Bolivar, is "drowned in the cement foam"(1.8), and the declaration of independence is "encrusted in a bronze urn"(1.14). Modernization is presented in imagery that relates to water and the ocean. Unlike much water, however, this type does not vivify, but encrusts and drowns. The "1000 Cadillacs" (1.11), symbolic of avarice, are described as sharks attracted by the scent of money:

They swim upwards then through the shoals of Galicians and the rest of the 7 000 000 lesser organisims toward the bright bloodsmell of $$$$$ lapping hotels like beached liners on the airwashed atolls of America's Venezuela (11.15-21)

Here, as in some of the poems of Mexico in Ice Cod Bell or Stone, progress is viewed as destroying the native beauty and culture of the country concerned--in this istance, Venezuela. By using such language as "pumped up", "great hose", "marginal bogs", "ooze of slums", the poet sustains the meataphor of the country as an island or atoll deluged with wealth and lucre. The poem is a non-didactic indictment of modern civilization, in that the materialism of America is representative of the ills of Western Society. In another poem, "Guadelupe", the poet sees, even in the people who benefit from the prosperity, a richness of past, a mentality, that is beyond his grasp:

20 Birney,"Caracas", Near False Creek Mouth, p.23, 11.1-7.(Poem #9) 104.

Ah senoritas with permanent seats in the bullring and escorts who know headwaiters in Paris it's not till you park your Alfa Romeros a quartermile from the shrine and coifed in black lace from Aragon crawl on your silken penitential knees over the cobbles that I see you have Mexican blood running with sins and anesthesias 21 richer than any my veins will ever carry

The satiric tone of the treatment of the status symbols of the

ladies cannot be overlooked; but~ beyond this~ the last three

lines of the poem remind one of the old lady in "Transistor"~ even tough the characters of the two poems are at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Both the senoritas and the cleaning

lady are heirs to pasts that the poet can appreciate but never possess. His appreciation even extends to the sins of the senoritas and their ability to repent in the way that they do.

It is evident~ from such poems as "Transistor" on the one hand and "Caracas" on the other~ that the poet views the people of the countries that he visits in two different ways. They are seen as having a culture and past that are to be envied but~ at the same time~ they are tainted by the materialism that infects his own society. In the poem "Cartagena de Indias" the more squalid aspects of the struggle to survive are presented, but the resultant

21 Birney~ "Guadelupe"~ Near False Creek Mouth~p.39.(Poem 1117) 105.

impression left with the poet is considerably different from that of

"Caracas". The poem begins with a quotation from Heredia that states the former greatness of Cartagena:

Ciudad triste, ayer reina de la mar22

Today, the queen of the sea has become only a shadow of her former self. Cartagena is presented as it now is by the poet who, as tourist, is an alien among the local inhabitants:

Each fact its own phantom its own formula of breed and shade but all the eyes accuse me back and say

There are only two races here:

we human citizens who are poor but have things to sell and you from outer space unseasonable our one tourist but P-ainly able to buy 23

Immediately, the dichotomy is set up between the foreigner and the locals; seeing the squalor around him, the poet contrasts the past with the present:

This arthritic street where Drake's men and Cole's ran swung cutlasses where wine and sweet blood snaked in the cobbles' joints leaps now in a sennet of taxi horns to betray my invasion All watch my first retreat to barbizans patched from Morgan's grapesnot and they rush me three desperate tarantula youths waving Old Golds unexcised (11. 10-20)

22 J ose' Ma r1a. d e Here d.1a, 1nscr1pt1on. . . trans 1 ated b y B.1rney, prefatory to "Cartagena de Indias", Near False Creek Mouth,p.30

23 Birney, "Cartagena de Indias", Near False Creek Mouth,p.30 11.1-9. (Poem# 13) 106.

The noise of the taxis and the black-market cigarette pedlars are followed by shoeshine boys and "a congo-drum man in jeans" (1.24) selling watches. As the poet continues his walk through the city, he is aware that he is regarded with suspicion:

I cast a shadow of silence blue-dreaded eyes corpse face hidalgo clothes tall one tall as a demon pass 0 pass us quickly (p.31, 11.40-45)

The only reason he is tolerated is because of his money; as a wealthy tourist, he has what so many of the inhabitants want. Everything about the poet serves only to separate him from the people:

It's written in the cut of my glasses I've a hotelroom all to myself with a fan and a box of Vitamin C It can be measured in my unnatural stride that my life expectation is more than forty especially now that I'm close to sixty (p.32, 11. 71-78)

At last, the poet encounters a monument; he comes

to a pair of shoes in a circle of baked mud worn out of shape one on its side For a second I am shaken by panic heat? humidity? something has got me the shoes are concrete and ten feet long (p.33, 11.99-105)

A plaque tells the poet that the momument was erected to the memory of Luis Lopez and his old shoes. He goes to a bookstore and discovers

that "los zapatos" (1.111) are the people of Cartagena themselves;

the owner further explains the significance of the monument: 107.

See here this sonnet always he make hard words Said we were lazy except to make noise we only shout to get money ugly too, backward ..• why not? It is for a poet to write these things Also plena--how say it?-- plena de rancio desalino Full of rancid disarray! Si si but bok, at the end, when old he come to say one nice thing only one ever about us He say we inspire that love a man has for his shoes--Entonces we give him a monument to the shoes (p.34, 11.125-139)

Now the poet sees the people of Cartagena in a different l i ght from that of the initial part of the poem. The volume of poetry by Luis Lopez that he purchases creates the same love in him that the

South American poet himself felt:

Discarded queen I thought I love you too Full of rancid disarray city like any city full of the stench of human indignity and disarray of the human proportion full of the noisy always poor and the precocious dying stinking with fear the stale of ignorance I love you first for giving birth to Luis Lopez

Descendents of pirates grandees galleyslaves and cannibals I love the whole starved cheating poetry-reading lot of you for throwing me the shoes of deadman Luis to walk me back into brotherhood (p.34, 11.143-152; p.35, 11.158-163) 108.

This statement of brotherhood is perhaps one of the most moving declarations that Birney as poet and humanist makes. Sharing a common humanity with the inhabitants of Cartagena, he is able to rise above the divisions of tongue, race, and economics. Despite the obvious failings of the inhabitants, they still inspire love; they have accorded an honour to Luis Lopez that the poet's own people do not give him:

--and him I envy I who am seldom read by my townsmen (p.34, 11.156-157)

Perhaps it is because they have managed to retain some interest in that which is not strictly material that the poet comes to share a sense of communality he does not always find among his own people.

Nevertheless, the poet's acceptance or lack of acceptance at home, as poet, appears a secondary matter in the context of the poem as a whole. As has already been indicated, the central thought of the poem is the transcending of the divisions described earlier and the attain- ment of brotherhood. Here, as elsewhere, the interest of the poet lies in the area of human values and human concerns, the elements that divide men and the factors that unite them.

In the section "Farthes~ Neighbours" appears the poem "Letter to a Cuzco Priest". It continues Birney's interest in the welfare of men. The poem is both a story of injustice and a plea for brotherhood;

it is addressed to a young priest whose words have inspired a group 109. of Incas to protest government injustice. Structurally, the story of their fate is interspersed throughout the format of the letter.

The poem begins:

Father whose name your smalltown paper took in vain

Young father whose face blurred in the cheap newsprint

I could not recognize in a street

Father who will never know me nor read this which is written in your. honour in the terms of my worship24

It is appropriate that the opening address of the poem should be couched in terms akin to those of a prayer since the poet dedicates his work to the priest. In line e~even the narrative commences:

This morning two Incas tramped on their horny feet down sun-ravaged slopes clutching cardboard banners Thirty more Indians followed sunfaced silent ragged (11.11-16)

Protesting the state of their poverty, the shepherds and their flock proceed downhill past the oblivious tourists. The authorities and the vested interests are disturbed and the army is called upon to halt the march. The violence that ensues results in two Indians being killed and twenty wounded and imprisoned. Well-meant words of the priest were written on the posters of the natives:

24 Birney, "Letter to a Cuzco Priest", Near False Creek Mouth, p.S0,11. 1-9 (Poem# 21) 110.

"The Government is only an armed front an armed front for Fifty Families" (p.52, 11.1-2)

"Let the land feed its people" (1. 4)

Asked both to forgive himself and worship himself for his part in the massacre, the priest is addressed with understanding and the local incident is generalized:

Father · the guilt is not yours though words that blazed last week from your pulpit lettered their placards

The two who bore them are dead

Father the guilt begins

In the other pulpits and all the places where no one will say your words (p.51, 11.46-52)

Continuing the universalization, the poet sees the priest as a mediator of human forgiveness for all mankind:

Father forgive all men if you must but only in despite of god and in Man's name (p.52, 11.64-66)

Man must become more human, more dependant upon his own will than on God, for it is only in awakening the better qualities of man that injustice can be prevented. The concluding lines of the poem are a further plea, this time more personal than>but just as poignant as the others:

Pray to yourself above all for men like me that we do not quench the man in each of us (p.53, 11.92-95) 111.

The story of the Incas and the injustice of the state's

treatment of them is but a modern variation of an old theme. In

the poem "Machu Picchu", the poet speaks of the lost shrine of the

Incas and the suffering some of them had to endure at the hands of Pizarro and the Spanish; the Indian natives died rather than

reveal the whereabouts of their holy city, whose location was finally

discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911. In the poem there are four visitors to Machu Picchu, of whom the poet is one. Here, as in

"Conducted Ritual: San Juan de Ulua" and "Pachucan Miners", Birney manifests a poetic interest in the historic past:

But the truth is our talk was mainly to hide how we felt growing suddenly bodily back into legend no conquisador hooked even his mailed finger into

Today in fact stirred by quite nameless excitement we have walked in the last dark hour groped up stairs grooved and gouged in the living rock to stand higher than the highest watchtowers like Broken spectres magnified on the black peak and see the Sun rise still on what was meant to worship Him25

The visitors are in awe because they have come into contact with a

moment of glory in man's past. While the city of Machu Picchu and the

legend surrounding it are steeped in suffering, the Incas themselves

have produced and are the inheritors of a past that is rich in

25 Birney, "Machu Picchu", Near False Creek Mouth, p.56, 11.65-69; pp.56-57, 11.80-89. (Poem# 22) 112. tradition and hallowed by the shedding of human blood; now, for a brief moment, the poet and the other visitors share in that heritage.

Soon, however, they must leave and as they descend the sight of two

Incan shepherds arouses much the same envious response as the old lady of "Transistor":

and passing two latterday Incas hewers of dung chewers of cocaine wandering in some dull symbiosis (not one of us could hope for) with their silent herds (p.57, 11.102-106)

The poem concludes on a note that is both sombre and optimistic, for

Machu Picchu, like all things human, is transistory; but until such time as it does pass away,

Till then it is good and beautiful to see you stare out of your green humped cumulus of mountains and the human mist you and Hiram Bingham and the high Incas obstinately into your Sun (p. 58, 11.120-125)

The poems of Ice Cod Bell or Stone, and Near False Creek Mouth, as we have seen, deal with a variety of topics ranging through the spectrum of such general areas as culture, history and society. They show, in varying degrees, Birney's inclination for whatever is associated with men. As with. the earlier poems, many of these later ones contain an implicit, and sometimes an explicit, plea for understanding and fellow- ship- the only real solution to the problems of men in today's world. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION . 114.

In this thesis we have attempted to show a thematic continuity

in the poetry of Earle Birney. The poems have been treated, for the

most p~rt, in chronological order because the temporal arrangement permits

an ease of handling that might not otherwise be attained. Not all of

Birney's poems have been included in the discussion for the number of

poems precludes an analysis of each one. In the last section of Chapter

Four, for example, the emphasis has been placed upon the poem from which

the volume Near False Creek Mouth receives its name and upon the sections

"Caribbean Turnabout" and "Farthest Neighbours".

The interest in people of foreign lands displayed by the later volumes of poetry is but a continuation of Birney's humanism in the

earlier poems and in Trial of a City. Many of the earlier poems treat of

men in a state of great crisis, men at war, and men living with a

precarious peace. In the drama Trial of a City, Vancouver becomes the

scapegoat for the ills of modern man and his civilization. The past, in

the personages of the witnesses, has no power to redeem the present or

alter the future. Only by willing to live each day better can man

determine that tomorrow will be good. The poems published before Trial

underscore the ability of man to create a better world and the new genre

summarizes all that Birney has said about the human condition to that

point. Ice Cod Bell or Stone and Near False Creek Mouth, to a great

extent, look at men of foreign lands in the light of their own unique

historical backgrounds. Birney admires and envies the tradition that 115.

they possess, yet does not view the differences between his own heritage and theirs as insurmountable obstacles to brotherhood.

One of the points that has been made regarding Birney's technique is his inclination to experiment with language; in addition, he uses many verse forms and genres. From both of these his poetry receives a certain vigor and forcefulness that it might not possess had he ~imited his techniques and modes of expression.

In keeping with his versatility and constant search for new approaches, Birney has revised many of the poems here discuss~d.

A number of these appear in his Selected Poems,published in 1966.

The writer of this thesis has preferred to leave a consideration of the revisions to students of bibliography and textual criticism; what has been said regarding man's will, the precariousness of the human condition, love and brotherhood, is not altered by the poems

in their revised form. The continuity of the poet's humanism is

sustained, though the literary merits of one version of a poem as opposed to another may well be debated.

Humanism, as here treated, does not exhaust the possibi~ities

for further consideration of Earle Birney and his works. No mention has been made of his criticism of his novels. Of the latter he has written only two: Turvey and Down the Long Table; his criticism has not been collected and is, therefore, limited to articles in various 116. books and periodicals. The one exception is his The Creative Writer, originally a series of C.B.C. broadcasts and later published by that same corporation. Certainly any assessment of Birney's position in the field of Canadian letters would of necessity include his poetry, criticism, and novels. Such an ambition, however, has not been within

the scope of this thesis. The poetry itself provides ample material for analysis and discussion and indeed, may continue to do so, for the well-springs of Birney's poetry do not appear to be drying up as he 1 becomes older. While it is perhaps true that no single poem surpasses

"David", the poems of Ice Cod Bell or Stone and Near False Creek Mouth are of a more even quality than those of the earlier volumes.

The poems which have been chosen for discussion in this thesis are representative of the poet's work as a whole. Selection may at times seem arbitrary, as the theme of humanism is present in many poems of

Birney not treated here. Consideration of these other poems, however, would have resulted in needless repetition and added little to what has been said. We conclude this study with the words of the poet himself who writes of his poetry:

I prefer to believe ... that my poems are the best proof I can print of my humanness, signals out of the loneliness into which all of us are born and in which we die, affirmations of kinship with the other wayfarers, and above all with you, my Not Impossible Reader, who will go on from here. 2

1 Witness the presence of the "concrete" poems "Lines" and "Walls" in Prism International, VI, No.3(Spring,1967),42-43. Such works testify to the poet's continuing interest in the forms of poetry.

2 Earle Birney,"Preface", Selected Poems:1940-1966 (Toronto,1966),p.xii. A Selective Bibliography 118.

Primary Sources

Birney, Earle. ''Advice to Anthologists", Canadian Forum, XXI (1942) , 338-340.

------The Creative Writer. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1966.

David and Other Poems. Tornnto: Ryerson Press, 1942 •

.Ice Cod Bell or Stone. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962.

"Lines" and "Walls", Prism International, VI, No. 3 (Spring, 1967), 42-43.

Near False Creek Houth. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964.

Now is Time. Toronto: Ryerson ~ress, 1945.

------The Poems of Earle Birney. New Canadian Library Selection. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969.

11 "Proletarian Literature , Canadian Forum, XVII(l937), 58-60.

Selected Poems: 1940-1966. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966.

The Strait of Anian. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948.

"To Arms with Canadian Poetry", Canadian Forum XIX(l940), 322-324.

Trial of a City and Other Verse. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952.

Dickins, Bruce and Nilson R.M., eds. "The Bestiary", in Early Middle English Texts. Rev. ed. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956[1951]. 119.

Secondary Sources

i) Reviews

Anon, Rev. of "David", Canadian Author and Bookman, XIX, No. 2(June, 1943), 15-16.

Carruth, Hayden. "Up, Over and Out: the Poetry of Distraction"; rev. article of Selected Poems, Tamarack Review, No.42(Winter, 1967), 61-69.

Clarke, G.H. Rev. of David and Other Poems, Queens Quarterly, XLIX (1942), 397.

Rev. of Now is Time, Queens Quarterly, LIII (1946), 266.

Rev. of The Strait of Anian, Queens Quarterly, LV(l948),230.

Frye, Northrop. Rev. of David and Other Poems, Canadian Forum, XXII (1942), 278-279.

Gustafson, Ralph. Rev. of The Strait of Anian, Canadian Forum, XXVIII, No.329 (June, 1948), 69.

Guy, E.F. Rev. of Ice Cod Bell or Stone, Dalhousie Review, XLIII(l963), 429-433.

Helwig, David. Rev. of Selected Poems:l940-1966, Quarry, XVI, No.2 (January, 1967), 43-44.

Holmes, Theodore. Rev. of Selected Poems: 1940-1966, Dalhousie Review, XLVII(l967-68), 261-265.

Jones, B.W. Rev. of Near False Creek Mouth, Queens Quarterly, LXXII (1965-66), 696.

Jones, D.G. Rev. of Ice Cod Bell or Stone, Queens Quarterly, LXIX (1962), 467;.;.468.

Lund, Kenneth. Rev. of Selected Poems: 1940-1966, Canadian Author and Bookman, XLII, No. !(Autumn, 1966), 20.

Marshall, T.A. Rev. of Selected Poems:l940-1966, Queens Quarterly, LXXIII (1966), 608-609. 120.

Martin, M.H. Rev. of Now is Time, Canadian Forum, XXV(l946), 292-293.

McCarthy, Brian. Rev. of Near False Creek Mouth, Tamarach Review, No. 36 (Summer, 1965), 71-72.

Paynter, Simon. Rev. of Trial of a City and Other Verse, Canadian Forum, XXXIII (1953), 91.

Pratt, E.J. Rev. of David and Other Poems, Canadian Poetry Magazine, VI (1943), 34-35.

Purdy, A.W. "Prose Birney"; a rev. of The Creative \vriter, Canadian Literature, No. 31 (Winter, 1967), 61-64.

Skelton, Robin. "Canadian Poetry" ; includes a rev. of Ice Cod Bell or Stone, Tamarack Review, No.29 (Autumn, 1963), 72-73.

Wilson, Milton. Rev. of Ice Cod Bell or Stone, University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIT '1963), 368-371.

------Rev. of Near False Creek Mouth, University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIV (1965), 349-352. 121.

ii) Articles and Books Relevant to a Study of Earle Birney

Brown, E.K. "To the North: a Wall against Canadian Poetry", Saturday Review of Literature, XXVII (April, 1944), 9-11.

Clay, Charles. "Earle Birney, Canadian Spokesman", in Leading Canadian Poets. W.P. Percival, ed. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948.

Daniells, Roy. "Earle Birney et Robert Finch", Gants du Ciel, XI(l946), 83-96.

Dudek, Louis and Michael Gnarowski, eds. The Making of 'Hodern Poetry in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967.

Elliott, Brian. "Earle Birney, Canadian Poee', Meanjin, LXXVIII (1959), 338-34 7.

Fredeman, \.Jilliam E. "Earle Birney-Author, Poet", British Columbia Library Quarterly, XXIII (1960), 8-15.

Jacobs, Willis D. William Barnes Linguist. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952.

Pacey, Desmond. Creative Writing in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952.

Creative Writing in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1961.

"Earle Birney" in Ten Canadian Poets. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1958.

Rashley, R.E. Poetry in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1958.

Smith, A.J.M. "A Unified Personality", Canadian Literature, No.30(Autumn, 1966), 4-13.

Sutherland, John. "Earle Birney's 'David'", First Statement, I, No.9 (undated), 6-8.

11 West, Paul. "Earle Birney and the Compound Ghost , Canadian Literature, No. 13(Summer, 1962), 5-14.

Wilson, Milton. 11 Poet Without a Muse", Canadian Literature, No. 30(Autumn, 1966), 14-20.

Woodcock, George. "Turning New Leaves", Canadian Forum, XLVI (1966), 115-116. 122.

Supplementary Bibliography

The following is a list of some poems that have been published in periodicals; with few exceptions they have appeared in the volumes that have been used in this thesis. This supplement is offered in the hope that it may be of some assistance to future students of Birney in their study of the text and authorial revisions.

Birney, Earle. "At my Shetland Aunt's", Quarry, XV, No. 1 (September, 1965), 32-33.

"The Ballad of Mr. Chubb", Canadian Forum, XXX (1950), 207.

------"Cadet Hospital" and "The Road to Nijmegen" under the title "Two Letters" , Queens Quarterly, Lii (1945), 158-159.

"Campus Theatre Steps", Quarry, XVI, No. 1 (October, 1966), 44.

"Caribbean Kingdoms", Canadian Poetry, XXX No. 4 (August, 1967}, 75.

"D-Day", Queens Quarterly, LII (1945), 390.

"David", Canadian Forum, XXI (1941), 274-276.

------"Dusk on English Bay", Canadian Poetry, V, No. 1 {September, 1940), 25.

"Epidaurus", Queens Quarterly, LXX (1964), 527.

"For Maister Geffrey", Queens Quarterly, LXXV (1968)~ 401.

"For Steve", Canadian Forum, XXIV (1944), 112-113.

"Grey Rocks", Canadian Forum, XVI, No. 194 (March, 1937), 10.

------"In Purdy's Ameliasburg", Tamarack Review, No.39 (September, 1966), 36-38. 123.

Supplementary Bibliography (continued)

Birney:. Earle. "Kootenay Still-Life":. Canadian Forum, XXII, No.256 (May, 1942), 44.

11 ------"Lines for Lotus-Eaters , Canadian Forum, XIX, No. 230 (March, 1940), 385.

"Looking from Oregon", Quarry, XV, No.4 (August, 1966), 32-33.

------":tvfacchu Pichu", Canadian Poetry, XXVII, No. 1 (November, 1963), 9-12.

------"The Mammoth Corridors", Tamarack Review, No. 41 (Autumn, 1966), 42-47.

"Man is a Snow", Queens Quarterly, LIV (1947), 172.

------"Monody for a Century", Canadian Poetry, V, No. 1 (September, 1940), 26.

------"On Cartagena, his Native City", "For George Lamming", "Can. His.t", "Advice to a Hamilton (Ont.) Lady About to Travel Once More", "Curacao", Tamarack Review, No. 30 (Winter, 1964), 23-27.

"On the Beach", Canadian. Forum, XLIII (March, 1964), 276.

------and Ilona Duczynska, trans. "On the City's Rim" by Jozsef Attila, Canadian Forum, XLIII (1964), 226.

------"Reverse on the Coast Range'', Canadian Poetry, VI., No. 1 (December, 1944), 18.

------"Slug in Woods", Canadian Forum, XVI, No. 193 (February, 1937), 22.

------"Smalltown Hotel", Canadian Poetry, V, No. 2 (December, 1940), 53. 124.

Supplementary Bibliography (continued)

Birney, Earle. "State of Sonora", "Wake Islandu, rrEl Greco: Espolio", "Vitus Bering", "Captain Cook", uPachucan Miners", Tamarack Review, No. 18 (Winter, 1961), 52-58.

"V-E Night", Canadian Forum, XXV, No. 295 (August, 1945), 118.

"Waterton Holiday", Canadian Poetry, VI, No. 2 (April, 1942), 17.